Global Operating Systems Technology Group

Welcome to the home page for the Global Operating Systems Technology Group. The GOST group is organized informally, consisting of faculty, staff, and students from the the Computer Networks Division of the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California who are working on infrastructure and services for information discovery and retrieval, network security, electronic commerce, electronic payment, and distributed parallel computing.

Projects

• CLIQUES
• Congestion Control for Internet Multicast
• Critical Resource Allocation and Intrusion Response for Survivable Information Systems (CRISIS)
• Distributed Virtual Systems Project (DIVIRS)
• Improving the Performance of Web Caching
• Security Infrastructure for Large Distributed Systems (SILDS)
• Global Operating System Technologies (GOST)
• Supporting Organizationally Accepted Practice (SOAP)
• Scalable Computing Infrastructure (SCOPE)
• Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TRAFCON)
• Dynamic Policy Evaluation for Containing Network Attacks (DEFCN)

Work is underway across these projects in the following subject areas:

• Information Infrastructure: The Prospero Directory Service and the Prospero File Access protocol provide a flexible and extensible framework for building information services. Prospero was designed to be scalable, and communication with the server is more efficient than similar protocols.
• Security Infrastructure: The Kerberos system will be extended to support authentication using public key cryptography, and distributed authorization and accounting servers will be built using a restricted proxy mechanism layered on top of Kerberos.
• Electronic Commerce: NetCheque(SM) supports electronic payments similar to checks, which may be sent by electronic mail, or in real time as part of other protocols. NetCash is layered over NetCheque and supports anonymous payment over open networks.
• Computing Infrastructure: The Prospero Resource Manager (PRM) supports the scalable allocation of processing resources for parallel computing on large multi-organizational networks.

ISI's work in these areas is funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency through its Information Technology Office.

Products

• Kerberos - Computer security
• Prospero - Information infrastrcutre
• The Prospero Resource Manager - Distributed parallel computing
• NetCheque - Network payment and electronic commerce
• NetCash - Anonymous network payment
• GAA API - Generic Authorization and Access control API