arXiv subjects

Jonathon Anderson

Publications and source records attributed to Jonathon Anderson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Universal Session Protocol: Mitigating Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution

Currently, the TCP/IP model enables exploitation of vulnerabilities anonymously by unconditionally fulfilling every request for a connection into an application; the model only incorporates authentication within applications themselves, rather than as a precondition for access into applications. I am proposing the Universal Session Protocol as a change to the architecture of the TCP/IP model to include a session layer featuring a structured generalized process for authentication negotiation and fulfillment. The Universal Session Protocol addresses an urgent and vital need to eliminate unauthenticated data processing on security critical systems. Previous work regarding TCP/IP security has focused on the application design and implementation and existing protocol layers, but has failed to posit the addition of a session layer as a mitigating control. Failing to implement a distinct authentication layer leaves every resource connected to the global Internet, including life and security critical infrastructure, vulnerable to attacks from anonymous and untraceable sources. The Universal Session Protocol provides a solution by establishing a TCP/IP Session Layer that explicitly provides authentication before a data stream is accessible within an application. After authentication, an identity is associated with the data stream so that all data may be related back to that identity for forensic purposes. If authentication fails, the application will never process user data, rendering the service safe from anonymous bad actors.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Measurement and Analysis of GPU-accelerated Applications with HPCToolkit

To address the challenge of performance analysis on the US DOE's forthcoming exascale supercomputers, Rice University has been extending its HPCToolkit performance tools to support measurement and analysis of GPU-accelerated applications. To help developers understand the performance of accelerated applications as a whole, HPCToolkit's measurement and analysis tools attribute metrics to calling contexts that span both CPUs and GPUs. To measure GPU-accelerated applications efficiently, HPCToolkit employs a novel wait-free data structure to coordinate monitoring and attribution of GPU performance. To help developers understand the performance of complex GPU code generated from high-level programming models, HPCToolkit constructs sophisticated approximations of call path profiles for GPU computations. To support fine-grained analysis and tuning, HPCToolkit uses PC sampling and instrumentation to measure and attribute GPU performance metrics to source lines, loops, and inlined code. To supplement fine-grained measurements, HPCToolkit can measure GPU kernel executions using hardware performance counters. To provide a view of how an execution evolves over time, HPCToolkit can collect, analyze, and visualize call path traces within and across nodes. Finally, on NVIDIA GPUs, HPCToolkit can derive and attribute a collection of useful performance metrics based on measurements using GPU PC samples. We illustrate HPCToolkit's new capabilities for analyzing GPU-accelerated applications with several codes developed as part of the Exascale Computing Project.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Preparing for Performance Analysis at Exascale

Performance tools for emerging heterogeneous exascale platforms must address two principal challenges when analyzing execution measurements. First, measurement of large-scale executions may record mountains of performance data. Second, performance measurements for parallel programs are sparse in two ways: the set of metrics present for any context and the set of contexts present in different threads. For GPU-accelerated applications, an important source of sparsity is that none of the myriad of GPU metrics apply to any of the many CPU contexts. To address these challenges, we developed a novel streaming aggregation approach to postmortem analysis that employs both shared and distributed memory parallelism to aggregate sparse performance measurements from every rank, thread, and GPU stream of an application, and attributes heterogeneous call path profiles and traces to source code. Using the same amount of resources, our approach analyzes large-scale performance measurements of GPU-accelerated applications over an order of magnitude faster than HPCToolkit and its sparse analysis results are as much as three orders of magnitude smaller than HPCToolkit's dense representation of metrics.

cs.DC↗