Biblio

Scientific applications built on wide-area distributed systems such as emerging cloud based architectures and the legacy grid computing infrastructure often struggle with user adoption even though they succeed from a systems research perspective. This paper examines the coupling of user-centered design processes with modern distributed systems. Further in this paper, we describe approaches for conceptualizing a product that solves a recognized need: to develop a data gateway to serve the data management and research needs of experimentalists of electron microscopes and similar shared scientific instruments in the context of a research service laboratory. The purpose of the data gateway is to provide secure, controlled access to data generated from a wide range of scientific instruments. From the functional perspective, we focus on the basic processing of raw data that underlies the lab's "business" processes, the movement of data from the laboratory to central access and archival storage points, and the distribution of data to respective authorized users. Through the gateway interface, users will be able to share the instrument data with collaborators or copy it to remote storage servers. Basic pipelines for extracting additional metadata (through a pluggable parser framework) will be enabled. The core contribution described in this paper, building on the aforementioned distributed data management capabilities, is the adoption of user-centered design processes for developing the scientific user interface. We describe the user-centered design methodology for exploring user needs, iteratively testing the design, learning from user experiences, and adapting what we learn to improve design and capabilities. We further conclude that user-centered design is, in turn, best enabled by an adaptable distributed systems framework. A key challenge to implementing a user-centered design is to have design tools closely linked with a software system architecture that can evolve over time while providing a highly available data gateway. A key contribution of this paper is to share the insights from crafting such an evolvable design-build-evaluate-deploy architecture and plans for iterative development and deployment.

Most security software tools try to detect malicious components by cryptographic hashes, signatures or based on their behavior. The former, is a widely adopted approach based on Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) enabling appraisal and attestation of system components. The latter, however, may induce a very long time until misbehavior of a component leads to a successful detection. Another approach is a Dynamic Runtime Attestation (DRA) based on the comparison of binary code loaded in the memory and well-known references. Since DRA is a complex approach, involving multiple related components and often complex attestation strategies, a flexible and extensible architecture is needed. In a cooperation project an architecture was designed and a Proof of Concept (PoC) successfully developed and evaluated. To achieve needed flexibility and extensibility, the implementation facilitates central components providing attestation strategies (guidelines). These guidelines define and implement the necessary steps for all relevant attestation operations, i.e. measurement, reference generation and verification.