Cloud computing has become the mainstream computing paradigm nowadays. More and more data owners (DO) choose to outsource their data to a cloud service provider (CSP), who is responsible for data management and query processing on behalf of DO, so as to cut down operational costs for the DO.  However, in real-world applications, CSP may be untrusted, hence it is necessary to authenticate the query result returned from the CSP.  In this paper, we consider the problem of approximate string query result authentication in the context of database outsourcing. Based on Merkle Hash Tree (MHT) and Trie, we propose an authenticated tree structure named MTrie for authenticating approximate string query results. We design efficient algorithms for query processing and query result authentication. To verify effectiveness of our method, we have conducted extensive experiments on real datasets and the results show that our proposed method can effectively authenticate approximate string query results.

ARM chips with low energy consumption and low-cost investment have been rapidly applied to smart office and smart entertainment including cloud mobile phones and cloud games. This paper first summarizes key technologies and development status of the above scenarios including CPU, memory, IO hardware virtualization characteristics, ARM hypervisor and container, GPU virtualization, network virtualization, resource management and remote transmission technologies. Then, in view of the current lack of publicly referenced ARM cloud constructing solutions, this paper proposes and constructs an implementation framework for building an ARM cloud, and successively focuses on the formal definition of virtualization framework, Android container system and resource quota management methods, GPU virtualization based on API remoting and GPU pass-through, and the remote transmission technology. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed model and corresponding component implementation methods are effective, especially, the pass-through mode for virtualizing GPU resources has higher performance and higher parallelism.

Common schedulers for long-term running services that perform task-level optimization fail to accommodate short-living batch processing (BP) jobs. Thus, many efficient job-level scheduling strategies are proposed for BP jobs. However, the existing scheduling strategies perform time-consuming objective optimization which yields non-negligible scheduling delay. Moreover, they tend to assign BP jobs in a centralized manner to reduce monetary cost and synchronization overhead, which can easily cause resource contention due to the task co-location. To address these problems, this paper proposes TEBAS, a time-efficient balance-aware scheduling strategy, which spreads all tasks of a BP job into the cluster according to the resource specifications of a single task based on the observation that computing tasks of a BP job commonly possess similar features. The experimental results show the effectiveness of TEBAS in terms of scheduling efficiency and load balancing performance.

Distributed edge cloud computing is an important computation infrastructure for Internet of Things (IoT) and its task offloading problem has attracted much attention recently. Most existing work on task offloading in distributed edge cloud computing usually assumes that each self-interested user owns one edge server and chooses whether to execute its tasks locally or to offload the tasks to cloud servers. The goal of each edge server is to maximize its own interest like low delay cost, which corresponds to a non-cooperative setting. However, with the strong development of smart IoT communities such as smart hospital and smart factory, all edge and cloud servers can belong to one organization like a technology company. This corresponds to a cooperative setting where the goal of the organization is to maximize the team interest in the overall edge cloud computing system. In this paper, we consider a new problem called cooperative task offloading where all edge servers try to cooperate to make the entire edge cloud computing system achieve good performance such as low delay cost and low energy cost. However, this problem is hard to solve due to two issues: 1) each edge server status dynamically changes and task arrival is uncertain; 2) each edge server can observe only its own status, which makes it hard to optimize team interest as global information is unavailable. For solving these issues, we formulate the problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) which can well handle the dynamic features under partial observations. Then, we apply a multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm called value decomposition network (VDN) and propose a VDN-based task offloading algorithm (VDN-TO) to solve the problem. Specifically, the motivation is that we use a team value function to evaluate the team interest, which is then divided into individual value functions for each edge server. Then, each edge server updates its individual value function in the direction that can maximize the team interest. Finally, we choose a part of a real dataset to evaluate our algorithm and the results show the effectiveness of our algorithm in a comparison with some other existing methods.

Multi-FPGA systems have been receiving a lot of attention as a low cost and energy efficient system for Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). For such purpose, a bare-metal multi-FPGA system called FiC (Flow-in-Cloud) is under development. In this paper, we introduce the FiC multi FPGA cluster which is applied partial reconfiguration (PR) FPGA design flow to support online user defined accelerator replacement while executing FPGA interconnection network and its low-level multiple FPGA management software called remote PR manager. With the remote PR manager, the user can define the FiC FPGA cluster setup by JSON and control the cluster from user application with the cooperation of simple cluster management tool / library called ficmgr on the client host and REST API service provider called ficwww on Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi3) on each node. According to the evaluation results with a prototype FiC FPGA cluster system with 12 nodes, using with online application replacement by PR and on-the-fly FPGA bitstream compression, the time for FPGA bitstream distribution was reduced to 1/17 and the total cluster setup time was reduced by 21∼57% than compared to cluster setup with full configuration FPGA bitstream.

With the development of cameras and sensors and the spread of cloud computing, life logs can be easily acquired and stored in general households for the various services that utilize the logs. However, it is difficult to analyze moving images that are acquired by home sensors in real time using machine learning because the data size is too large and the computational complexity is too high. Moreover, collecting and accumulating in the cloud moving images that are captured at home and can be used to identify individuals may invade the privacy of application users. We propose a method of distributed processing over the edge and cloud that addresses the processing latency and the privacy concerns. On the edge (sensor) side, we extract feature vectors of human key points from moving images using OpenPose, which is a pose estimation library. On the cloud side, we recognize actions by machine learning using only the feature vectors. In this study, we compare the action recognition accuracies of multiple machine learning methods. In addition, we measure the analysis processing time at the sensor and the cloud to investigate the feasibility of recognizing actions in real time. Then, we evaluate the proposed system by comparing it with the 3D ResNet model in recognition experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the action recognition accuracy is the highest when using LSTM and that the introduction of dropout in action recognition using 100 categories alleviates overfitting because the models can learn more generic human actions by increasing the variety of actions. In addition, it is demonstrated that preprocessing using OpenPose on the sensor side can substantially reduce the transfer quantity from the sensor to the cloud.

A conventional data center that consists of monolithic-servers is confronted with limitations including lack of operational flexibility, low resource utilization, low maintainability, etc. Resource disaggregation is a promising solution to address the above issues. We propose a concept of disaggregated cloud data center architecture called Flow-in-Cloud (FiC) that enables an existing cluster computer system to expand an accelerator pool through a high-speed network. FlowOS-RM manages the entire pool resources, and deploys a user job on a dynamically constructed slice according to a user request. This slice consists of compute nodes and accelerators where each accelerator is attached to the corresponding compute node. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of FiC in a proof of concept experiment running a distributed deep learning application on the prototype system. The result successfully warrants the applicability of the proposed system.

The term “flash crowd” describes a situation in which a large number of users access a Web service simultaneously. Flash crowds, in particular, constitute a critical problem in e-commerce applications because of the potential for enormous economic damage as well as difficulty in management. Flash crowds can become more serious depending on users' behavior. When a flash crowd occurs, the delay in server response may cause users to retransmit their requests, thereby adding to the server load. In the present paper, we propose to use the psychological factors of the users for flash crowd mitigation. We aim to analyze changes in the user behavior by presenting feedback information. To evaluate the proposed method, we performed subject experiments and stress tests. Subject experiments showed that, by providing feedback information, the average number of request retransmissions decreased from 1.33 to 0.09, and the subjects that abandoned the service decreased from 81% to 0%. This confirmed that feedback information is effective in influencing user behavior in terms of abandonment and retransmission of requests. Stress tests showed that the average number of retransmissions decreased by 41%, and the proportion of abandonments decreased by 30%. These results revealed that the presentation of feedback information could mitigate the damage caused by flash crowds in real websites, although the effect is limited. The proposed method can be used in conjunction with conventional methods to handle flash crowds.

A fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) would be the important cryptosystem as the basic scheme for the cloud computing. Since Gentry discovered in 2009 the first fully homomorphic encryption scheme, some fully homomorphic encryption schemes were proposed. In the systems proposed until now the bootstrapping process is the main bottleneck and the large complexity for computing the ciphertext is required. In 2011 Zvika Brakerski et al. proposed a leveled FHE without bootstrapping. But circuit of arbitrary level cannot be evaluated in their scheme while in our scheme circuit of any level can be evaluated. The existence of an efficient fully homomorphic cryptosystem would have great practical implications in the outsourcing of private computations, for instance, in the field of the cloud computing. In this paper, IND-CCA1secure FHE based on the difficulty of prime factorization is proposed which does not need the bootstrapping and it is thought that our scheme is more efficient than the previous schemes. In particular the computational overhead for homomorphic evaluation is O(1).

Systems for Internet of Things (IoT) have generated new requirements in all aspects of their development and deployment, including expanded Quality of Service (QoS) needs, enhanced resiliency of computing and connectivity, and the scalability to support massive numbers of end devices in a variety of applications. The research reported here concerns the development of a reliable and secure IoT/cyber physical system (CPS), providing network support for smart and connected communities, to be realized by means of distributed, secure, resilient Edge Cloud (EC) computing. This distributed EC system will be a network of geographically distributed EC nodes, brokering between end-devices and Backend Cloud (BC) servers. This paper focuses on three main aspects of the CPS: a) resource management in mobile cloud computing; b) information management in dynamic distributed databases; and c) biological-inspired intrusion detection system.

Cloud computing is a unlimited computing resource and storing resource, which provides a lot of convenient services, for example, Internet and education, intelligent transportation system. With the rapid development of cloud computing, more and more people pay attention to reducing the cost of data management. Data sharing is a effective model to decrease the cost of individuals or companies in dealing with data. However, the existing data sharing scheme cannot reduce communication cost under ensuring the security of users. In this paper, an anonymous and traceable data sharing scheme is presented. The proposed scheme can protect the privacy of the user. In addition, the proposed scheme also can trace the user uploading irrelevant information. Security and performance analyses show that the data sharing scheme is secure and effective.

Cloud computing enables computational resource-limited devices to economically outsource much computations to the cloud. Modular exponentiation is one of the most expensive operations in public key cryptographic protocols, and such operation may be a heavy burden for the resource-constraint devices. Previous works for secure outsourcing modular exponentiation which use one or two untrusted cloud server model or have a relatively large computational overhead, or do not support the 100% possibility for the checkability. In this letter, we propose a new efficient and verifiable algorithm for securely outsourcing modular exponentiation in the two untrusted cloud server model. The algorithm improves efficiency by generating random pairs based on EBPV generators, and the algorithm has 100% probability for the checkability while preserving the data privacy.

Nowadays the computing technology is going through a major paradigm shift. Local processing platforms are being replaced by physically out of reach yet more powerful and scalable environments such as the cloud computing platforms. Previously, we introduced the OJIT system as a novel approach for obfuscating remotely executed programs, making them difficult for adversaries to reverse-engineer. The system exploited the JIT compilation technology to randomly and dynamically transform the code, making it constantly changing, thereby complicating the execution state. This work aims to propose the new design iOJIT, as an enhanced approach that patches the old systems shortcomings, and potentially provides more effective obfuscation. Here, we present an analytic study of the obfuscation techniques on the generated code and the cost of applying such transformations in terms of execution time and performance overhead. Based upon this profiling study, we implemented a new algorithm to choose which obfuscation techniques would be better chosen for “efficient” obfuscation according to our metrics, i.e., less prone to security attacks. Another goal was to study the system performance with different applications. Therefore, we applied our system on a cloud platform running different standard benchmarks from SPEC suite.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have become an attractive platform for general-purpose computing (GPGPU) in various domains. Making GPUs a time-multiplexing resource is a key to consolidating GPGPU applications (apps) in multi-tenant cloud platforms. However, advanced GPGPU apps pose a new challenge for consolidation. Such highly functional GPGPU apps, referred to as GPU eaters, can easily monopolize a shared GPU and starve collocated GPGPU apps. This paper presents GLoop, which is a software runtime that enables us to consolidate GPGPU apps including GPU eaters. GLoop offers an event-driven programming model, which allows GLoop-based apps to inherit the GPU eaters' high functionality while proportionally scheduling them on a shared GPU in an isolated manner. We implemented a prototype of GLoop and ported eight GPU eaters on it. The experimental results demonstrate that our prototype successfully schedules the consolidated GPGPU apps on the basis of its scheduling policy and isolates resources among them.

This work is conducted to solve the current problem in the attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) scheme about how to securely and efficiently delegate the search rights to other users when the authorized user is not online. We first combine proxy re-encryption (PRE) with the ABKS technology and propose a scheme called attribute-based keyword search with proxy re-encryption (PABKS). The scheme not only realizes the functions of data search and fine-grained access control, but also supports search function sharing. In addition, we randomly blind the user's private key to the server, which ensures the confidentiality and security of the private key. Then, we also prove that the scheme is selective access structure and chosen keyword attack (IND-sAS-CKA) secured in the random oracle model. A performance analysis and security proof show that the proposed scheme can achieve efficient and secure data search in the cloud.

Virtual Machine Placement (VMP) plays an important role in ensuring efficient resource provisioning of physical machines (PMs) and energy efficiency in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) data centers. Efficient server consolidation assisted by virtual machine (VM) migration can promote the utilization level of the servers and switch the idle PMs to sleep mode to save energy. The trade-off between energy and performance is difficult, because consolidation may cause performance degradation, even service level agreement (SLA) violations. A novel residual available capacity (RAC) resource model is proposed to resolve the VM selection and allocation problem from the cloud service provider (CSP) perspective. Furthermore, a novel heuristic VM selection policy for server consolidation, named Minimized Square Root available Resource (MISR) is proposed. Meanwhile, an efficient VM allocation policy, named Balanced Selection (BS) based on RAC is proposed. The effectiveness validation of the BS-MISR combination is conducted on CloudSim with real workloads from the CoMon project. Evaluation results of experiments show that the proposed combinationBS-MISR can significantly reduce the energy consumption, with an average of 36.35% compared to the Local Regression and Minimum Migration Time (LR-MMT) combination policy. Moreover, the BS-MISR ensures a reasonable level of SLAs compared to the benchmarks.

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) has been proposed as a new approach to enhance mobile device performance via computation offloading. The growth in cloud computing energy consumption is placing pressure on both the environment and cloud operators. In this paper, we focus on energy-efficient resource management in MCC and aim to reduce cloud operators' energy consumption through resource management. We establish a deterministic resource management model by solving a combinatorial optimization problem with constraints. To obtain the resource management strategy in deterministic scenarios, we propose a deterministic strategy algorithm based on the adaptive group genetic algorithm (AGGA). Wireless networks are used to connect to the cloud in MCC, which causes uncertainty in resource management in MCC. Based on the deterministic model, we establish a stochastic model that involves a stochastic optimization problem with chance constraints. To solve this problem, we propose a stochastic strategy algorithm based on Monte Carlo simulation and AGGA. Experiments show that our deterministic strategy algorithm obtains approximate optimal solutions with low algorithmic complexity with respect to the problem size, and our stochastic strategy algorithm saves more energy than other algorithms while satisfying the chance constraints.

Many life-log analysis applications, which transfer data from cameras and sensors to a Cloud and analyze them in the Cloud, have been developed as the use of various sensors and Cloud computing technologies has spread. However, difficulties arise because of the limited network bandwidth between such sensors and the Cloud. In addition, sending raw sensor data to a Cloud may introduce privacy issues. Therefore, we propose a pipelined method for distributed deep learning processing between sensors and the Cloud to reduce the amount of data sent to the Cloud and protect the privacy of users. In this study, we measured the processing times and evaluated the performance of our method using two different datasets. In addition, we performed experiments using three types of machines with different performance characteristics on the client side and compared the processing times. The experimental results show that the accuracy of deep learning with coarse-grained data is comparable to that achieved with the default parameter settings, and the proposed distributed processing method has performance advantages in cases of insufficient network bandwidth between realistic sensors and a Cloud environment. In addition, it is confirmed that the process that most affects the overall processing time varies depending on the machine performance on the client side, and the most efficient distribution method similarly differs.

With the popularity of cloud computing services, outsourcing computation has entered a period of rapid development. Modular exponentiation is one of the most expensive operations in public key cryptographic systems, but the current outsourcing algorithms for modular exponentiations (MExps) with single server are inefficient or have small checkability. In this paper, we propose an efficient and fully verifiable algorithm for outsourcing multiple MExps with single untrusted server where the errors can be detected by an outsourcer with a probability of 1. The theory analysis and experimental evaluations also show that the proposed algorithm is the most efficient one compared with the previous work. Finally, we present the outsourcing schemes of digital signature algorithm (DSA) and attribute based encryption (ABE) as two applications of the proposed algorithm.

In this letter, we investigate the computation offloading problem in cloud based multi-robot systems, in which user weights, communication interference and cloud resource limitation are jointly considered. To minimize the system cost, two offloading selection and resource allocation algorithms are proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms both can greatly reduce the overall system cost, and the greedy selection based algorithm even achieves near-optimal performance.