Ada Gavrilovska — Page 2

arXiv2018

DRIVESHAFT: Improving Perceived Mobile Web Performance

With mobiles overtaking desktops as the primary vehicle of Internet consumption, mobile web performance has become a crucial factor for websites as it directly impacts their revenue. In principle, improving web performance entails squeezing out every millisecond of the webpage delivery, loading, and rendering. However, on a practical note, an illusion of faster websites suffices. This paper presents DriveShaft, a system envisioned to be deployed in Content Delivery Networks, which improves the perceived web performance on mobile devices by reducing the time taken to show visually complete web pages, without requiring any changes in websites, browsers, or any actions from end-user. DriveShaft employs (i) crowdsourcing, (ii) on-the-fly JavaScript injection, (iii) privacy preserving desensitization, and (iv) automatic HTML generation to achieve its goals. Experimental evaluations using 200 representative websites on different networks (Wi-Fi and 4G), different devices (high-end and low-end phones) and different browsers, show a reduction of 5x in the time required to see a visually complete website while giving a perception of 5x-6x faster page loading.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

SPX: Preserving End-to-End Security for Edge Computing

Beyond point solutions, the vision of edge computing is to enable web services to deploy their edge functions in a multi-tenant infrastructure present at the edge of mobile networks. However, edge functions can be rendered useless because of one critical issue: Web services are delivered over end-to-end encrypted connections, so edge functions cannot operate on encrypted traffic without compromising security or degrading performance. Any solution to this problem must interoperate with existing protocols like TLS, as well as with new emerging security protocols for client and IoT devices. The edge functions must remain invisible to client-side endpoints but may require explicit control from their service-side web services. Finally, a solution must operate within overhead margins which do not obviate the benefits of the edge. To address this problem, this paper presents SPX - a solution for edge-ready and end-to-end secure protocol extensions, which can efficiently maintain end-to-edge-to-end ($E^3$) security semantics. Using our SPX prototype, we allow edge functions to operate on encrypted traffic, while ensuring that security semantics of secure protocols still hold. SPX uses Intel SGX to bind the communication channel with remote attestation and to provide a solution that not only defends against potential attacks but also results in low performance overheads, and neither mandates any changes on the end-user side nor breaks interoperability with existing protocols.

cs.CR↗