Computers, Volume 3, Issue 1 (March 2014) – 2 articles , Pages 1-57

This paper presents a cache-aware configurable hybrid flash translation layer (FTL), named CACH-FTL. It was designed based on the observation that most state-of­­-the-art flash-specific cache systems above FTLs flush groups of pages belonging to the same data block. CACH-FTL relies on this characteristic to optimize flash write operations placement, as large groups of pages are flushed to a block-mapped region, named BMR, whereas small groups are buffered into a page-mapped region, named PMR. Page group placement is based on a configurable threshold defining the limit under which it is more cost-effective to use page mapping (PMR) and wait for grouping more pages before flushing to the BMR. CACH-FTL is scalable in terms of mapping table size and flexible in terms of Input/Output (I/O) workload support. CACH-FTL performs very well, as the performance difference with the ideal page-mapped FTL is less than 15% in most cases and has a mean of 4% for the best CACH-FTL configurations, while using at least 78% less memory for table mapping storage on RAM. Full article

Cloud computing is an emerging technology paradigm that migrates current technological and computing concepts into utility-like solutions similar to electricity and water systems. Clouds bring out a wide range of benefits including configurable computing resources, economic savings, and service flexibility. However, security and privacy concerns are shown to be the primary obstacles to a wide adoption of clouds. The new concepts that clouds introduce, such as multi-tenancy, resource sharing and outsourcing, create new challenges to the security community. Addressing these challenges requires, in addition to the ability to cultivate and tune the security measures developed for traditional computing systems, proposing new security policies, models, and protocols to address the unique cloud security challenges. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of cloud computing security and privacy concerns. We identify cloud vulnerabilities, classify known security threats and attacks, and present the state-of-the-art practices to control the vulnerabilities, neutralize the threats, and calibrate the attacks. Additionally, we investigate and identify the limitations of the current solutions and provide insights of the future security perspectives. Finally, we provide a cloud security framework in which we present the various lines of defense and identify the dependency levels among them. We identify 28 cloud security threats which we classify into five categories. We also present nine general cloud attacks along with various attack incidents, and provide effectiveness analysis of the proposed countermeasures. Full article