Musings
Starting in 1998, I wrote a Musings column for every issue of ;login:, as well as edited ten special issues; from 2005 to 2025 I was the editor
Authors: Rik Farrow
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Wafer-Scale AI Compute: A System Software Perspective
Wafer scale chips have hundreds of thousands of GPU cores, along with memory and on-wafer networking, and managing these resources requires a new type of operating system
Authors: Congjie He, Yeqi Huang, Pei Mu, Mike Wang, Ziming Miao, Jilong Xue, Lingxiao Ma, Fan Yang, Luo Mai
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Musings on LLMs
I examine why LLMs are so power hungry, as well as why NVIDIA hardware is so popular: it's the software!
Authors: Rik Farrow
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Design Tradeoffs at the Edge
Connections, HTTP parsing, discovery, and load balancing. Operating reverse proxies at scale means tradeoffs. Here’s what we learned keeping the edge up.
Authors: Mitendra Kumar Mahto
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
AI in the Pipeline: Reliability Lessons from Adding an LLM to CI/CD
What happens when you embed AI directly into CI/CD? Lessons from the field on failures, fixes, and the guardrails that made it work.
Authors: Guruprasad Raghothama Rao
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Evaluating AI Agents at Production Scale: A Multi-Signal Framework
Understanding user ratings is difficult when using just A/B testing or technical measures; using AI to judge satisfaction works more accurately.
Authors: Nikita Kryzhanouski
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Catch-22: Detecting Compromised SSH Servers with SSH Public Keys
Using SSH’s key-authentication behavior, researchers identified over 16K systems globally where attacker keys were installed — turning malicious persistence into detection.
Authors: Cristian Munteanu, Tobias Fiebig, Georgios Smaragdakis, Anja Feldmann
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
eBPF and the Systems Trilemma
eBPF helps reshape operating system design by balancing tradeoffs between safety, performance, and programmability
Authors: Bill Mulligan
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Toward Practical and Usable Provenance-based Intrusion Detection Systems
Are provenance-based intrusion detection systems truly practical for security analysts? We explore this question and propose ways to enhance their real-world applicability.
Authors: Tristan Bilot, Thomas Pasquier
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
SecSRE: Bringing Security into the SRE World
SRE teams know how to build reliable, fault-tolerant systems, and the same SRE techniques can be applied to security.
Authors: Sabitha Muppuri, Sangharsh Agarwal
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
National Cyber Security Strategies: The Past, Present, and Future
When it comes to cyber security policy in the United States, the "What" has remained the same, but the "How" changes to address the latest threat landscape in each administration.
Authors: Vaibhav Garg, Jayati Dev, Noopur Davis, Rudy Brioché
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
The Tools and Tolls of AI Nudification
AI nudification isn’t fringe. It’s mainstream, scalable, and disturbingly accessible. We studied how these tools work, and what future researchers must know before they do too.
Authors: Cassidy Gibson, Kevin R. B. Butler, Tadayoshi Kohno, Elissa M. Redmiles
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Crescendo: A Quiet Crescendo in the Arms Race of LLM Jailbreaking
Crescendo presents a new approach to jailbreaking LLMs: beginning with a permitted query and building on responses to trick any LLM to respond with forbidden results.
Authors: Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
The Hidden Cost of Location Tracking
Location trackers like AirTags are misused for stalking despite the availability of protection features. We looked into how well these features work in practice.
Authors: Dañiel Gerhardt, Matthias Fassl
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Package Hallucinations: How LLMs Can Invent Vulnerabilities
Package hallucinations are an AI-enabled threat to users and the software supply chain. Our research reveals this phenomenon is a systemic and persistent issue across all models.
Authors: Joseph Spracklen, Raveen Wijewickrama, A.H.M. Nazmus Sakib, Anindya Maiti, Bimal Viswanath, Murtuza Jadliwala
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Asterinas: A Rust-Based Framekernel to Reimagine Linux in the 2020s
Asterinas reimagines Linux in safe Rust with a novel “framekernel” architecture—combining microkernel security with monolithic performance.
Authors: Hongliang Tian, Yuke Peng, Yingwei Luo, Shoumeng Yan, Yinqian Zhang
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Memory Safety is Merely Table Stakes
Rust makes new systems programs safer, but developers still need to use existing libraries. Omniglot ensures both type and memory safety when working with untrusted foreign code.
Authors: Leon Schuermann, Jack Toubes, Tyler Potyondy, Pat Pannuto, Mae Milano, Amit Levy
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
Interview with Ben Pfaff
In 2015, Ben Pfaff et al won a Best Paper award for The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch. In 2025, they received the NSDI Test-of-Time award.
Authors: Ben Pfaff, Rik Farrow
Article shepherded by: Rik Farrow
