July 19, 2006

MS Research Paper - Planet Scale Software Updates

MSR-TR-2006-85 - Planet Scale Software Updates
By Christos Gkantsidis; Thomas Karagiannis; Pablo Rodriguez; Milan Vojnovic
June-2006
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=1129

Fast and effective distribution of software updates (a.k.a. patches) to millions of Internet users has evolved into a critical task over the last years. The reasons are at least twofold: (i) the large, ever-increasing number of users requires costly server resources and (ii) the shrinking time between vulnerability disclosure and malware appearance requires rapid patching. In this paper, we characterize "Windows Update", one of the largest update services in the world, with the aim to draw general guidelines on how to best design and architect a fast and effective planet-scale patch dissemination system. To this end, we analyze an extensive number of data traces collected over the period of a year, consisting of billions of queries from over 300 million computers. Based on empirical observations and analytical results, we identify interesting properties of today's update traffic and user behavior. Building on this analysis, we consider alternative patch delivery strategies such as caching and peer-to-peer and evaluate their performance. We identify key factors that determine the effectiveness of these schemes in reducing the server workload and the network traffic, and in speeding-up the patch delivery. Most of our findings are invariant properties induced by either user behavior or architectural characteristics of today's Internet, such as heterogeneity, bandwidth asymmetry, or user population distribution, and thus apply to the general problem of Internet-wide dissemination of software updates.

Keywords: Software Updates, Peer-to-peer, Caching

Entry categories: Microsoft
Posted by Jorgen Thelin at July 19, 2006 07:00 AM - [PermaLink]