Partisan: Scaling the Distributed Actor Runtime

Developer can specify network overlay -> better scalability
Default: unidirectional async messages between actors
- independent queue
- multiplexing into single queue per node
Default doesn’t fit all usecases
Customization:
- parallelism (increase the number of channels between nodes)
- named channels to separate different types of messages
- affinity scheduler to partition traffic across channels depending on source, destination and type
No changes to Erlang VM
Contribution:
- Design of Partisan
- Open Source implementation
- Ported Riak from Distributed Erlang to Partisan, analysis of the process
- Benchmarks

Key Negotiation of Bluetooth Attack: Breaking Bluetooth Security

Bluetooth uses “encryption key negotiation protocol” to agree on the entropy of the link-layer encryption key
All versions of the Bluetooth REQUIRE to use entropy values between 1 and 16 bytes
Alice proposes 16 bytes
Bob agrees or proposes lower value (1 - N-1) or aborts
Alice agrees
The entropy negotiation is performed over the Link Manager Protocol (LMP), it is not encrypted and not authenticated
LMP is transparent to the user as LMP packets are managed by the firmware and not propagated to higher layers
Attack: Key Negotiation Of Bluetooth (KNOB)
Charles makes the victims negotiate an encryption key with 1 byte of entropy
Charles brute-forces the encryption key in real time
Charles decrypts messages and inject valid messages
Nobody notices it