We present an improved constant-round secure two-party protocol for integer comparison functionality, which is one of the most fundamental building blocks in secure computation. Our protocol is in the so-called client-server model, which is utilized in real-world MPC products such as Sharemind, where any number of clients can create shares of their input and distribute to the servers who then jointly compute over the shares and return the shares of the result to the client. In the client-aided client-server model, as mentioned briefly by Mohassel and Zhang (S&P'17), a client further generates and distributes some necessary correlated randomness to servers. Such correlated randomness admits efficient protocols since otherwise, servers have to jointly generate randomness by themselves, which can be inefficient. In this paper, we improve the state-of-the-art constant-round comparison protocols by Damgå rd et al. (TCC'06) and Nishide and Ohta (PKC'07) in the client-aided model. Our techniques include identifying correlated randomness in these comparison protocols. Along the way, we also use tree-based techniques for a building block, which deviate from the above two works. Our proposed protocol requires only 5 communication rounds, regardless of the bit length of inputs. This is at least 5 times fewer rounds than existing protocols. We implement our secure comparison protocol in C++. Our experimental results show that this low-round complexity benefits in high-latency networks such as WAN. We also present secure Min/Argmin protocols using the secure comparison protocol.

This paper illustrates various content sharing systems that take advantage of cloud's storage and computational resources as well as their supporting conventional technologies. First, basic technology concepts supporting cloud-based systems from a client-server to cloud computing as well as their relationships and functional linkages are shown. Second, the taxonomy of cloud-based system models from the aspect of multiple clouds' interoperability is explained. Interoperability can be categorized into provider-centric and client-centric scenarios. Each can be further divided into federated clouds, hybrid clouds, multi-clouds and aggregated service by broker. Third, practical cloud-based systems related to contents sharing are reported and their characteristics are discussed. Finally, future direction of cloud-based content sharing is suggested.

We discuss the problem of finding a dominant sequence for sending input data items from a low-end client to a server for computational intensive tasks under the realistic assumption of unpredictable communication behavior. Under this assumption, the client has to send the input data items using a specified sequence to maximize the number of computations performed by the server at any time. The sequence-finding problem is NP-hard for the general case. In this paper, we address three fundamental and useful applications: the product of two polynomials, matrices multiplication and Fast Fourier Transform. We show that the sequence-finding problems of the three applications can be solved optimally in linear time. However, we also show counter examples to rule out any possibility of finding a dominant sequence for sparse cases of the three applications. Finally, a simulation is conducted to show the usefulness of our method.

The efficiency of algorithms managing data caches has a major impact on the performance of systems that utilize client-side data caching. In these systems, two versions of data can be maintained without additional overhead by exploiting the replication of data in the server's buffer and clients' caches. In this paper, we present a new cache consistency algorithm employing versions: Two Versions-Callback Locking (2V-CBL). Our experimental results indicate that 2V-CBL provides good performance, and in particular outperforms a leading cache consistency algorithm, Asynchronous Avoidance-based Cache Consistency, when some clients run only read-only transactions.

Wireless LANs (Local Area Networks) are currently spreading over diverse places such as hotels and airports, as well as offices and homes. Consequently, they provide convenient and important ways to access the Internet. Another type of communication model, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication on the Internet, has also attracted much attention, and P2P over wireless LANs will soon be very common. There are concerns about the capability of wireless stations (STAs) to send a large amount of traffic on an uplink. In this paper, we first clarify some issues that arise in this context by examining the feature of the Access Point(AP). Furthermore, we consider the role of the AP and propose, as a solution, ways of enabling both efficient and fair transmission over both the downlink and uplink. We evaluate the proposed schemes through simulations and show that communications over the uplink and downlink can share the wireless LAN access resource effectively. Furthermore, we show that coordinating our solution with the 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) can meet the different requirements of various types of traffic.

In a client-server system, when LRU or its variant buffer replacement strategy is used on both the client and the server, the cache performance on the server side is very poor mainly because of pages duplicated in both systems. This paper introduces a server buffer replacement strategy which uses a replaced page-id than a request page-id, for the primary information for its operations. The importance of the corresponding pages in the server cache is decided according to the replaced page-ids that are delivered from clients to the server, so that locations of the pages are altered. Consequently, if a client uses LRU as its buffer replacement strategy, then the server cache is seen by the client as a long virtual client LRU cache extended to the server. Since the replaced page-id is only sent to the server by piggybacking whenever a new page fetch request is sent, the operation to deliver the replaced page-id is simple and induces a minimal overhead. We show that the proposed strategy reveals good performance characteristics in diverse situations, such as single and multiple clients, as well as with various access patterns.

The advent of high-speed networks with quality of service guarantees, will enable the deployment of data-server distributed systems over wide-area networks. Most implementations of data-server systems have been over local area networks. Thus it is important, in this context, to study the performance of existing distributed data management protocols in the new networking environment, identify the performance bottlenecks and develop protocols that are capable of taking advantage of the high speed networking technology. In this paper, we examine and compare the scalability of the server-based two-phase locking protocol (s-2PL), and the group two-phase locking protocol (g-2PL). The s-2PL protocol is the most widely used concurrency control protocol, while the g-2PL protocol is an optimized version of the s-2PL protocol, tailored for high-speed wide-area network environments. The g-2PL protocol reduces the effect of the network latency by message grouping, client-end caching and data migration. Detailed simulation results indicate that g-2PL indeed scales better than s-2PL. For example, upto 28% improvement in response time is reported.

In client-server database management systems (DBMSs), inter-transaction caching is an effective technique for improving the performance. However, inter-transaction caching requires a cache consistency maintenance (CCM) protocol to ensure that cached copies at clients are kept mutually consistent. Such a protocol could be complex to implement and expensive to run, since several rounds of message exchange may be required. In this paper, we propose a new CCM scheme based on the primary-copy locking algorithm. In the proposed scheme, a number of lock requests and a data-shipping request are combined into a single message packet to reduce client-server interactions, which are known to be very critical to the performance of clientserver DBMSs. We examine its performance tradeoffs on the basis of a simulation model under a wide range of workloads. The performance results indicate that the proposed scheme improves the overall system throughput significantly over the caching two-phase locking and the optimistic two-phase locking scheme. Its higher performance mainly results from its lower communication overhead and lower degree of transaction blocking ratio.

In a conventional client-server system using the satellite communications, the responsibility of the system to the client user is considerably degraded by the long transmission time between the satellite and the ground terminal as well as the relatively low data transmission rate in comparison with the ground transmission line as the Ethernet. In this paper, a new client-server control, VEEC, is proposed to solve the problem. As a result of the experimental performance studies, it is clarified that the responsibility in the client is remarkably improved when the pre-fetching mechanism of VEEC works efficiently.