SVPN:CollaborateCom2008

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 FAQ/information for prospective attendees 2.1 How will I benefit from attending the tutorial? 2.2 How can I learn more about the systems that will be covered in the tutorial? 2.3 What are the requirements for attendees to participate in hands-on sessions? 2.4 Tentative program outline 3 Contact information 4 Acknowledgments

Introduction

Researchers from the University of Florida will give a half-day tutorial at CollaborateCom 2008 in Orlando, FL, November 13th 2008. Visit the conference web site for more information on registration, lodging, and travel.

In this tutorial, we will introduce attendees to "social virtual private networks" (Social VPN), a novel system architecture which leverages existing social networking infrastructures to enable ad-hoc VPNs which are self-configuring, self-managing, yet maintain security against untrusted parties. The main objective of a social VPN system is simple, yet quite powerful: to securely interconnect Internet users, where peer-to-peer IP-layer network tunnel links are created, automatically, as a result of connections established through social network infrastructures. The key principles in this approach are: (1) self-configuring virtual network overlays enable seamless bi-directional IP-layer connectivity among parties linked by means of social connections; (2) social networking infrastructures greatly facilitate the establishment of trust relationships among parties, and these can be seamlessly integrated with existing public-key cryptography implementations to authenticate and encrypt traffic flows on overlay links end-to-end; and (3) social VPNs greatly facilitate the deployment of collaborative applications.

This tutorial will describe the architecture of such Social VPNs and a prototype implementation which integrates the Facebook API and the IP-over-P2P (IPOP) virtual network. It will be demonstrated the ability of the prototype to support existing, unmodified TCP/IP applications while transparently dealing with the increasingly common case of users connected to the Internet through Network Address Translators (NATs). Applications include secure desktop sharing (VNC, RDP), file system sharing (Samba), multicast-DNS resource discovery (Bonjour), voice-over-IP (Ekiga), and cycle sharing (Condor) using virtual machine Grid appliances.

FAQ/information for prospective attendees

How will I benefit from attending the tutorial?

This tutorial will provide training on the use of novel collaboration environments, and also provide the technical background needed to understand the architecture and design of these systems.

The tutorial will focus on hands-on activities using software that the ACIS P2P research group at UF has been developing for over three years. You will come out of the tutorial with knowledge on how to use a set of collaboration tools that you can deploy and use in your own institution and with your collaborators (SocialVPN and Grid Appliance), as well as on the technical details behind their architecture.

Sessions will begin with short introductory presentations to provide motivations and context, followed by hands-on sessions where attendees will have a chance to interact with implementations of the SocialVPN and Grid appliance systems, followed by question/answer sessions and presentations that go in more depth into the underlying technology.

How can I learn more about the systems that will be covered in the tutorial?

There are presentations, technical reports, demonstration videos and screenshots available in the following Web sites:

• Social VPN web site
• Grid appliance portal
  • Archer project Wiki- Archer is a collaborative environment built upon the Grid appliance targeting the computer architecture community.

What are the requirements for attendees to participate in hands-on sessions?

Attendees will best benefit from the tutorial if they bring their own laptops for the hands-on sessions. Attendees without their own laptops will be organized into small groups as needed, and the instructors will also carry on live demonstrations of the hands-on sessions in their laptops.

The instructors will bring software for installation of the SocialVPN and Grid Appliance system. The best configuration to run these systems is:

• a Windows-based laptop
  • Linux is also supported. The Grid Appliance runs on MacOS systems but currently the SocialVPN system does not.
• 1GHz+ processor
• 512MB+ main memory
• 1GB+ free hard disk space available

Tentative program outline

1. Welcome and introductions
2. Presentation
   1. Introduction to IPOP
   2. Introduction to SocialVPN
3. Hands-on activity
   1. Installing the SocialVPN software
   2. Creating social network identities and relationships
   3. Collaborative applications
      1. Shared desktops
      2. Shared files
      3. Media streaming
      4. Chat
4. Break
5. Questions and answers
6. Presentation
   1. SocialVPN internals
      1. Discovery
      2. Routing
      3. Naming
      4. Security
7. Break
8. Presentation
   1. Introduction to Virtual machines and appliances
   2. Introduction to the Grid appliance
   3. Grid appliance internals
      1. Packaging and configuration
      2. Domain-specific customization
      3. Sandboxing
9. Hands-on activity
   1. Installing virtual machines and the Grid appliances
   2. Deploying cycle-sharing collaborative environments
   3. Running applications
      1. Condor basics
   4. Sharing data
      1. network file system
10. Questions and answers

Contact information

If you have any questions about the tutorial, please send an email to Renato Figueiredo (my firstname)@acis.ufl.edu.

Acknowledgments

This work is sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation Office of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) Program under award 0758596 (Center for Autonomic Computing).