Support from Red Hat Research for PhD students in France and Austria has borne its first fruits. Supported PhD students in both countries have published significant papers that have been accepted at renowned conferences: REBLS 2021 (focused on reactive and event-based languages and systems) and the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2022.
“Analysing the performance and costs of reactive programming libraries in Java,” from Red Hat engineers Julien Ponge and Clément Escoffier, PhD student Arthur Navarro, and Professor Frédéric Le Mouël (University of Lyon; INSA Lyon), was presented at REBLS 2021 on October 18, 2021. The paper discusses the performance of the three major Reactive Streams compliant libraries used in Java applications: RxJava, Project Reactor, and SmallRye Mutiny. The authors show that advanced optimization techniques such as operator fusion do not yield better performance on realistic I/O-bound workloads, and they significantly increase development and maintenance costs.
On November 16, 2021, Red Hat partners at Graz University of Technology released “Remote memory-deduplication attacks”. The paper, authored by Martin Schwarzl, Erik Kraft, Moritz Lipp, and Daniel Gruss, will be presented at the NDSS conference, to be held as a hybrid event from February 26 to March 3, 2022. The work reevaluates the security risk posed by memory deduplication in a single security domain. By observing timing differences among requests, the authors executed the first fully remote memory-deduplication attacks in both Windows and Linux operating systems. Their research demonstrates that such attacks are viable risks and proposes mitigation. More information about the conference can be found on the NDSS symposium website.
Long-term support for PhD students is an essential part of the Red Hat Research program. Though participants are evaluated with considerable care, it is not possible to guarantee a project’s success or its timeline for achieving major milestones. When these projects achieve recognition for their results, it is a reason to celebrate.