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Planet scale software updates

Published: 11 August 2006 Publication History

Abstract

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. 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 set 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, and thus apply to the general problem of Internet-wide dissemination of software updates.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 36, Issue 4
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
October 2006
445 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/1151659
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '06: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
    September 2006
    458 pages
    ISBN:1595933085
    DOI:10.1145/1159913
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 August 2006
Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 36, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. caching
  2. peer-to-peer
  3. software updates

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Inferring Software Update Practices on Smart Home IoT Devices Through User Agent AnalysisProceedings of the 2022 ACM Workshop on Software Supply Chain Offensive Research and Ecosystem Defenses10.1145/3560835.3564551(93-103)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
  • (2022)Preserving indomitable DDoS vitality through resurrection social hybrid botnetComputers and Security10.1016/j.cose.2021.102284106:COnline publication date: 25-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Democratizing CryptographyundefinedOnline publication date: 24-Aug-2022
  • (2021)Game updates enhance players’ engagement: a case of DOTA2Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Management and Management Science10.1145/3485190.3485209(117-123)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2021
  • (2020)Research on the influence of balance patch on players' character preferenceInternet Research10.1108/INTR-04-2019-014830:3(995-1018)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2020
  • (2019)Keepers of the machinesProceedings of the Fifteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3361476.3361496(273-288)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
  • (2019)A Promise Is A PromiseProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300834(1-12)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
  • (2018)Take It or Leave ItProceedings of the 34th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference10.1145/3274694.3274733(490-504)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2018
  • (2018)Asking for a FriendProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3243734.3243740(1238-1255)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
  • (2017)Impact of user characteristics on attitudes towards automatic mobile application updatesProceedings of the Thirteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3235924.3235939(175-193)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2017
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