Distributed Systems and Networks Lab

Our Spire intrusion-tolerant SCADA system for the power grid is featured in the Johns Hopkins Magazine Winter 2018 issue (12/10/2018).

• These articles from POWER Magazine, Futurity, and the JHU Hub and this JHU press release describe Spire's test deployment with the Hawaiian Electric Company. (02/21/2018)
• This blog post describes our recent work on a timely, reliable, and cost-effective Internet transport service, which received the best paper award at IEEE ICDCS 2017. (07/13/2017)
• Our paper "Timely, Reliable, and Cost-Effective Internet Transport Service using Dissemination Graphs" received the best paper award (out of 531 submissions) at IEEE ICDCS 2017. Some photos from the conference. (06/08/2017)
• Our Spire intrusion-tolerant SCADA system for the power grid was deployed by the DSN lab and Spread Concepts LLC and successfully withstood a red-team attack as part of a DoD ESTCP project led by Resurgo LLC. (03/27/2017 - 04/07/2017)
• This press release describes our recent work developing the first practical intrusion-tolerant network. (06/28/2016)

The Distributed Systems and Networks (DSN) Lab is a Computer Science research lab at Johns Hopkins University. We aim to invent and develop technologies with a real-world impact. To achieve this, we work to combine the practical and theoretical aspects of system-building to create systems that are not only practical and deployable, but also provably correct. The broad themes of our work are resilience, performance, and enabling services that were not previously possible.

We focus on dependable infrastructure: making the computerized networked infrastructure systems that our society relies upon resilient, performant, and secure. Our current research includes intrusion-tolerant systems for clouds and critical infrastructure with a focus on intrusion-tolerant SCADA systems for the power grid, as well as real-time reliable Internet services enabled by overlay networks and high-performance communication and coordination for modern data centers.

Examples of the systems developed in our lab include Spines, an overlay messaging framework, Spire, an intrusion-tolerant SCADA system for the power grid, and Spread, a high-performance group communication toolkit.

Our technologies are deployed in mission critical systems, support data center applications, are included in commercial products, and are used for research and teaching in universities and research labs around the world.