The IETF Multiprotocol Label Switching Standard: The MPLS Transport Profile Case

Multiprocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a technology for traffic engineering for and the optimization of IP networks. It's also an enabling technology for building applications on top of IP networks. The IETF has standardized the MPLS protocol suite, as well as technologies — such as virtual private networks and pseudowires — that build on it. MPLS is a mature technology and is used extensively by all the major network operators. The IETF has also standardized a technology — Generalized MPLS — that extends the MPLS control plane for use with other data plane technologies.     

Security for the Rest of Us: An Industry Perspective on the Secure-Software Challenge

While security was once a specialty of interest to only a few programmers, it's now a critical topic for almost all software engineers, project managers, and decision makers. Getting security right is hard because an attacker—having virtually unlimited time—needs to find only one vulnerability in a system to succeed, whereas the defender—constrained in time—must ensure that the system has no weak points. This article provides an introduction into the special issue, which focuses on creating and maintaining secure software by the wide range of developers who constitute the software industry—many who work in domains where cost (both production and maintenance) and time-to-market are the main driving factors. This article is part of a special issue on Security for the Rest of Us.     

Events and Sightings [including an obituary for Tadahiro Sekimoto]

Conference—History of Nordic Computing; IT History Society; Norsk Data—40th-anniversary celebrations; Control Data's 50th anniversary; Obituary—Tadahiro Sekimoto     

Engineering International Expansion: IBM and Remington Rand in European Computer Markets

US computer manufacturers—including IBM and Remington Rand—expanded into Europe after World War II. The companies overcame resistances and adjusted to different market conditions; how they did this, and why IBM succeeded more than others, is examined here. This article argues that IBM adeptly managed—or engineered—relationships with foreign governments and stakeholders through a European-wide manufacturing system and European research laboratories.     

Dynamic Trust Management

Trust management forms the basis for communicating policy among system elements and demands credential checking for access to all virtual private service resources—along with careful evaluation of credentials against specified policies—before a party can be trusted.     

XML Document Parsing: Operational and Performance Characteristics

Parsing is an expensive operation that can degrade XML processing performance. A survey of four representative XML parsing models—DOM, SAX, StAX, and VTD—reveals their suitability for different types of applications.     

Protect Us from Ourselves

A few weeks ago, a new Google Labs feature for their Gmail system made some news. They called it "mail goggles" and the tag line was "Stop sending mail you later regret". The announcement said that one of their engineers wanted to keep from sending pleas to his ex-girlfriend when he wasn't thinking straight, so he came up with a simple test. I checked my calendar — no, it wasn't April 1st — but I still couldn't help thinking this was an odd joke. Nope! Sure enough, if I go to the Labs page from my Gmail account, I see that the feature exists, with examples of simple — but not too simple — math problems it might pose.     

Secure Cyberspace: Answering the Call for Intelligent Action

As information technology permeates all societal layers and its use crosses increasingly national boundaries, information security has become of paramount importance. Understanding what motivates information security is part of the hard work in planning the mechanisms that will assure it. Arguably, ubiquitous networking—for a wide range of personal, commerce, enterprise, and national purposes—is responsible for many recent productivity gains. But with this convenience has come vulnerability to those who seek to do damage or benefit illegally. Today's dynamic technology marketplace—with product generations now measured in months—gives increased choice of functionality and style to millions of potential buyers and their escalating expectations. However, with every new device comes at least some segment of the user population that doesn't understand new functionality and, consequently, experiences decreased reliability and reduced privacy.     

Build Your Next Web Application with Erlang

Web developers find that the Erlang programming language—originally conceived more than 20 years ago for building long-running, fault-tolerant, highly concurrent telephony systems—is well-suited for server-side Web applications. This column describes Erlang-based Web development's current state of the art, highlighting several Erlang Web servers and Web development frameworks.     

Cloud Computing: IT as a Service

Cloud computing has been a dominant IT news topic over the past year, yet what it is and its industry impact—realized and potential—are only gradually becoming clear. To help demystify the matter, the authors presented a panel at the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), held last September in Beijing. The panel, "Cloud Computing and IT as a Service: Opportunities and Challenges," featured presentations from three IT vendor giants—Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco—addressing industry perspectives and cloud computing initiatives. This installment of the Trends department distills the authors' panel session and provides updates in the year since it occurred.     

Security by Checklist

We've all seen the checklists with suggestions for how to secure your system. Many of us have even written them. (I have.) The problem is that security is more complicated than that, and checklists—especially if followed slavishly or enforced without thought—can make matters worse.     

AI's 10 to Watch

The recipients of the 2008 IEEE Intelligent Systems 10 to Watch award—Philipp Cimiano, Dmitri Dolgov, Anat Levin, Peter Mika, Brian Milch, Louis-Philippe Morency, Boris Motik, Jennifer Neville, Erik Sudderth, and Luis von Ahn—discuss their current research and their visions of AI for the future.     

Context-Based Operational Transformation in Distributed Collaborative Editing Systems

Operational Transformation (OT) is a consistency maintenance technique for collaborative editing systems—a special class of distributed applications for supporting human-computer-human interaction and collaboration over communication networks. The theory of causality has been the foundation of all prior OT systems, but it is inadequate to meet essential OT requirements in functionality and correctness. In this paper, we analyze the limitation of the causality theory, propose a novel theory of operation context as the new foundation for OT systems, and present a new OT algorithm—Context-based OT (COT)—which provides uniform and efficient solutions to both consistency maintenance and undo problems. The COT algorithm has been implemented and used for supporting a range of novel collaborative applications. The context theory and context vectors are potentially applicable to other distributed computing applications.     

I'm Pc01002/SpringPeeper/ED288l.6; Who are You?

In considering identity management, the first issue is—What is identity? This is, of course, an issue that has plagued poets, philosophers, and playwrights for centuries. We're concerned with a more prosaic version of the question: How does an entity recognize another entity? This important question occurs when access to resources, such as health or financial records, services, or benefits, is limited to specific entities. The entity in question could be a person, a computer, or even a device with quite limited memory and computational power. In this issue of IEEE Security & Privacy—the first of what we suspect will be several special issues on identity management—we have chosen to focus on identity management in which the entity being identified is a person.     

Driving Automotive User Interface Research

Cars offer an interesting but challenging microcosm for pervasive computing research and, in particular, for interaction with pervasive computing systems. Increasingly, researchers are looking at interactive applications in the car and investigating human-car interaction from a computer science—rather than an ergonomics or mechanical engineering—perspective. This article reports on the International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, wherein participants shared presentations on topics such as aesthetics, user interaction and distraction, safety, and driver monitoring.     

The Reaction Time to Web Site Defacements

Web site defacement has become a common threat for organizations exposed on the Web. Several statistics indicate the occurrence rate of these incidents but not how long these defacements typically last. The authors present the results of a two-month study of more than 62,000 defacements to determine whether and when a reaction to a defacement occurs. Such reaction times tend to be unacceptably long — often several days — and with a long-tailed distribution.     

Uniting the Paper and Digital Worlds

Digital pen and paper technologies are increasingly popular in vertical markets such as health care, but the broad market of everyday consumers remains untapped. In the past year, several developers targeting that market have focused on notetakers—whether journalists, lawyers, or students—in the hope of uniting the paper and digital worlds.     

The Engineer's Tale: The Founding of Software Publishing Corporation

At the beginning of 1980, three people left Hewlett-Packard to form Software Publishing Corporation (SPC). The three were Fred Gibbons, president; Janelle Bedke, chief operating officer; and me—John Page—vice president of engineering. This is the story of how the events that led up to SPC's founding looked through my eyes: "The Engineer's Tale" (with a nod to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), if you will.     

Cleve Moler: Mathematical Software Pioneer and Creator of Matlab

A prominent figure in the numerical analysis community in his early academic career, Cleve Moler gradually shifted his research efforts to mathematical software, specifically to the development of Matlab, an educational software package. Matlab has evolved to become a commercial success in scientific and engineering applications. Moler—now Mathworks' chief scientist and chairman—is still involved in software development and applied computing research and education.