We participated in developing novel technology that leverages the storage abstractions of
modern operating systems (e.g., the relational databases and object-relational mappings of
Android) to automatically detect fragments strewn across memory, files and databases that is part
of the same logical application object, such as an email and its attachments, without requiring
source code or any cooperation on the part of application developers. This substrate enabled the development of our prototype tools to check that application-level deletions in fact actually delete all the data fragments related to, say, a document or a photo; to hide (and later unhide) sensitive data, e.g., to protect business data at international border crossings; and to detect when an application collects more data than required by its functionality. In our case study, our system worked correctly on 42 out of 50 real-world applications, and lead to publication of “best practices” rules of thumb required for the approach to work on future applications — e.g., fully declare database schemas, use the database to index file storage, use standard storage libraries, which are admittedly obvious to anyone with the software engineering training that some “app” developers sadly lack.

Contact Professor Roxana Geambasu (roxana@cs.columbia.edu) for further information.

Team Members

Faculty
Roxana Geambasu
Gail Kaiser

Graduate Students
Riley Spahn

Former Graduate Students
Jonathan Bell

Links

Publications

Riley Spahn,  Jonathan Bell, Michael Z. Lee, Sravan Bhamidipati, Roxana Geambasu and Gail Kaiser. Pebbles: Fine-Grained Data Management Abstractions for Modern Operating Systems. 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, October 2014, pp. 113-129.