Concerning Cyclic Authentication Makes Better Security

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Chris Allo

Common graph algorithms in computer science mostly assume that there’s no cycle in graph structure. On the other hand, the cyclic authentication proves to be a great tool for security enhancement indeed. A cycle means eternity. When a program meets the cycle, it never ends. We can apply the mechanism to ameliorate encryption algorithm. For instance, suppose that there are three individual services A, B and C. Service A has the password to access B, B has that of C and C has that of A. It’s a cyclic password lock. No one can break the cycle unless every service is completely exploited by attackers. Excluding social engineering cases, the countermeasure proves no way to break up. It’s a very subject worthy to consider.

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Cloudbean: New Research upon Cloud Database System

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Chris Allo

We’ve researched a cloud database solution for a couple of months; the project name is Cloudbean. The project aims to bring a specially structured database solution which is scalable, high-performance distributed database system. The optimization process is now going on to make the solution faster than before. And now we unveil the result of performance test conducted recently. The Cloudbean version is not the newest that the upgrade and code migration are still in progress. The tested Cloudbean version is 1.2, and the test environment – hardware specification – looks like below.

  • Intel Dual-core E6500 2.93GHz
  • Samsung 2GB Memory
  • WD SATA2 HDD 500GB (7,200 RPM)

The test is done with 100,000 key-value pairs in a single node. Each key and value sizes are 8 bytes. The following is the result of the test in reading and writing comparing to other noSQL solutions like membase and Cassandra.

  • membase: writes data for about 28 secs, reads for about 12 secs in average
  • cassandra: writes data for about 30 secs, reads for about 72 secs in average
  • cloudbean data service: writes data for about 26 secs, reads for 2 secs in average

The optimization in this project means to minimize the data writing to disk. We have developed the prototype version 1.2, which is not stable yet though, the next version 2.0 would be more stable, satisfying ACID properties. Cloudbean is designed to offer a special purposed data model so that we could be prepping for a new kind of cloud service. Long way to go, but we have a vision for delivery.

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Terms in Term Sheet Series 3: Pay-to-Play

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Chris Allo

Pay-to-Play

I think the pay-to-play provision is described well enough in Wikipedia, that says,

Pay to Play is a provision in a corporation’s charter documents (usually inserted as part of a preferred stock financing) that requires stockholders to participate in subsequent stock offerings in order to benefit from certain antidilution protections. If the stockholder does not purchase his or her pro rata share in the subsequent offering, then the stockholder loses the benefit(s) of the antidilution provisions.

As we see, with the provision, the investor may have the right to plugged in the subsequant deal with the prescribed portion. It’s important especially in down round, for the investor who has the shares of Series A Preferred can get more preferred stock in lower price.

If the provision is exerted, the securities would be converted automatically to a series of preferred stock. On the other hand, when it fails they will be converted to a common stock resulting in the loss of all preferential rights – antidilution protection, liquidation preference, Board seat and so on.

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