QoS3: Secure Caching in HTTPS Based on Fine-Grained Trust Delegation

With the ever-increasing concern in network security and privacy, a major portion of Internet traffic is encrypted now. Recent research shows that more than 70% of Internet content is transmitted using HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). However, HTTPS encryption eliminates the advantages of many intermediate services like the caching proxy, which can significantly degrade the performance of web content delivery. We argue that these restrictions lead to the need for other mechanisms to access sites quickly and safely. In this paper, we introduce QoS3, which is a protocol that can overcome such limitations by allowing clients to explicitly and securely re-introduce in-network caching proxies using fine-grained trust delegation without compromising the integrity of the HTTPS content and modifying the format of Transport Layer Security (TLS). In QoS3, we classify web page contents into two types: (1) public contents that are common for all users, which can be stored in the caching proxies, and (2) private contents that are specific for each user. Correspondingly, QoS3 establishes two separate TLS connections between the client and the web server for them. Specifically, for private contents, QoS3 just leverages the original HTTPS protocol to deliver them, without involving any middlebox. For public contents, QoS3 allows clients to delegate trust to specific caching proxy along the path, thereby allowing the clients to use the cached contents in the caching proxy via a delegated HTTPS connection. Meanwhile, to prevent Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks on public contents, QoS3 validates the public contents by employing Document object Model (DoM) object-level checksums, which are delivered through the original HTTPS connection. We implement a prototype of QoS3 and evaluate its performance in our testbed. Experimental results show that QoS3 provides acceleration on page load time ranging between 30% and 64% over traditional HTTPS with negligible overhead. Moreover, QoS3 is deployable since it requires just minor software modifications to the server, client, and the middlebox.

Performance of the Belle II Conditions Database

The Belle II experiment at KEK observed its first collisions in the summer of 2018. Processing the large amounts of data that will be produced requires conditions data to be readily available to systems worldwide in a fast and efficient manner that is straightforward for both the user and maintainer. This was accomplished by relying on industrystandard tools and methods: the conditions database is built as an HTTP REST service using tools such as Swagger for the API interface development, Payara for the Java EE application server, and Squid for the caching proxy. This article presents the design of the Belle II conditions database production environment as well as details about the capabilities and performance during both Monte Carlo campaigns and data reprocessing.

A Comparative Analysis of Content Delivery Network and Other Techniques for Web Content Delivery

Web content delivery is based on client-server model. In this model, all the web requests for specific contents are serviced by a single web server as the requested contents reside only on one server. Therefore, with the increasing reliance on the web, the load on the web servers is increasing, thus causing scalability, reliability and performance issues for the web service providers. Various techniques have been implemented to handle these issues and improve the Quality of Service of the web content delivery to end-users such as clustering of servers, client-side caching, proxy server caching, mirroring of servers, multihoming and Content Delivery Network (CDN). This paper gives an analytical and comparative look on these approaches. It also compares CDN with other distributed systems such as grid, cloud and peer-to-peer computing.

Segment-Based Proxy Caching for Streaming Media Delivery

At present the majority of streaming media files is large and it requires a lot of network bandwidth and disk bandwidth. We propose an adaptive segment-based method, the cache replacement method and the multi technologies combined optimized transmission policy. Simulation results indicate that they are highly efficient methods for use of caching proxy server resources, reducing the startup latency and save of bandwidth of backbone network.