Workshop on Changing Landscapes in HPC Security (CLHS), 2013

 Overview

Providing effective and non-intrusive security within a HPC environment provides a number of challenges for both researchers and operational personnel.  As the definition of what constitutes HPC expands to include cloud computing, 100G networking, cross-site integration, and web 2.0 based interfaces for job submission and reporting, the complexity of the aggregate system increases dramatically while the need for timely and accurate decision making about user activity remains unchanged.  This growing complexity is balanced against a backdrop of routine user and application attacks, which remain surprisingly effective over time.

This workshop will focus on the problems inherent in securing contemporary large-scale compute and storage systems.  To provide some clarification we have broken this out into four general areas or questions.  First is Attribution: who is doing what in terms of both process activity as well as network traffic?  Second is looking beyond the interactive nodes: what is going on in the computing pool?  Third involves job scheduler activity and usage: what is being run, how has it is been submitted and is this activity abnormal?  Finally a more philosophical topic of why securing complex systems is so difficult and what can be done about it.  While these specific areas are interesting starting points for papers and presentations, any original and interesting topic will be considered.

 Workshop Format

In order to best facilitate this, a two-track approach of research papers and state of the practice write-ups will be used.  We will ask participants in the research paper track to add a detailed section describing their ongoing data needs, while for the state of the practice track, we will ask that a section be added which describes possible data sharing opportunities their facility may have with individual researcher’s sites perspective.  Finally the ending track will be a combined lightning round and data exchange where workshop participants can share short presentations on interesting but incomplete works as well as describe what data they have to share or need.

The timeline for the workshop is approximately:

• • Opening Remarks ( 15 min)
  • Papers presentation ( approx 90 min )
  • break ( 30 min )
  • State of the practice presentations ( approx 90 min )
  • Lightning Round/closing remarks ( 30 min )

 Topics, Dates and Details

Besides the general class of problems described in the overview, the following should be considered a set of example topics that we are looking for in the research section track.

• • Accounting and Audit
  • Authentication
  • Cloud Security
  • Data and Application Security
  • Data/System Integrity
  • Database Security
  • Identity Management
  • Intrusion and Attack Detection
  • Intrusion and Attack Response
  • Secure Networking
  • Secure System Design
  • Security Monitoring & Management
  • Security in Untrusted & Adversarial Environments and Systems
  • Security of Grid and Cluster Architectures
  • Security Visualization

For the State of of the Practice papers, the focus will be on the resolution of specific issues - ideally those identified in the Overview section, but really any significant problem which is endemic to the HPC domain.  Within the paper an explanation and exploration of the issue, resolution description and a numerical analysis showing that the proposed issue resolution was successful.

Program Committee

The current program committee consists of the following people:

• • Mine Altunay, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
  • Galen Wesley Arnold, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
  • David Bailey, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
  • RuthAnne Bevier, Caltech
  • Scott Campbell, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
  • Carrie Gates, CA Technologies
  • Bill Kramer, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
  • Alex Malin, Los Alamos National Lab
  • Jim Marsteller, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
  • Jim Mellander, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
  • Sean Peisert, University of California Davis
  • Gene Rackow, Argonne National Lab
  • Aashish Sharma, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
  • Robin Sommer, International Computer Science Institute
  • Von Welch, Indiana University

Submission Timeline

• Abstract submission: February 4th, 2013 (11:59PM PST)
• Paper submission: February 25th, 2013 (11:59PM PST)
• Acceptance notification: March 25th, 2013
• Final papers due: April 15th, 2013

 Paper Submission Details

Papers should be submitted via the following link:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clhs2013

All papers submitted to the workshop will be peer reviewed and authors will be notified of acceptance/rejection decisions by March 18th, 2013.

The workshop advance program will be posted on the workshop's website well in advance of the workshop. Camera-Ready papers of accepted papers should be submitted by April 15th, 2013.

We invite the submission of original work that is related to the topics below. The papers should be up to 8 pages long.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed and judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance, quality of presentation, and relevance to the workshop topics of interest.

Submitted papers may not have appeared in or be under consideration for another workshop, conference or a journal, nor may they be under review or submitted to another forum during the CLHSHPDC 2013 review process.

Papers should be prepared in ACM SIG Proceedings format and submitted electronically (as a PDF file).

Submissions not conforming to these guidelines may be returned without review. Authors should submit the manuscript in PDF format and make sure that the file will print on a printer that uses letter size (8.5 x 11) paper. The official language of the meeting is English.

Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the HPDC conference to present the work.