Spread Concepts helps LTN Global Communications with the design, development and deployment of a proprietary world-wide cloud network for professional quality live video distribution. LTN connects video content owners, aggregators, TV stations, studios, satellite teleports and cable companies, for the transport and delivery of live TV. Examples include:

• Transporting major news channels in the US and internationally
• Broadcasting live events from studios to leading broadcasters
• Delivering live content to a large number of TV stations around the US

Spread Concepts maintains and continues development of Spire, an intrusion-tolerant SCADA system developed at Johns Hopkins University Distributed Systems and Networks lab (DSN). Spire is the first SCADA system designed to overcome attacks and compromises at both the system level and the network level, while meeting the timeliness requirements of power grid monitoring and control systems (100-200 milliseconds). Spread Concepts participated in the DoD ESTCP project in which Spire withstood a nation-state level red team attack at Pacific Northwest National Lab during March-April 2017, as well as a deployment in a mothballed power plant in Honolulu during Janurary-February 2018.

Public cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon's EC2, flexibly enables the deployment of computational tasks by outsourcing much of the necessary hardware and software investment and maintenance to a third party. However, trusting a third party with access to potentially sensitive information opens up a multitude of security and privacy questions. Figuring out the best ways to utilize the new cloud infrastructure while maintaining necessary security and privacy guarantees is an active area of research. As part of that effort, Spread Concepts is a member of a team researching cryptographic protocols to help ensure privacy in the Cloud in a publish-subscribe setting such as Amazon's Simple Notification Service (SNS). The goal of our research is to develop multiple protocols that enable the use of a publish-subscribe service while ensuring that subscribers' interests cannot be learned by any adversary under various assumed threat models.

Spread Concepts has extensive experience designing, developing, and deploying non-centralized group Publish Subscribe systems in a variety of network environments including Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks. Examples of our work in this space includes:

• Design & Implement Scalable Reliable Multicast (SRM) w/ Persistence
• Design & Implement Group Pub/Sub using a Gossiping Anti-Entropy foundation
• Gossiping group routing module for DTN2 (www.dtnrg.org)
• Hardening of DTN2 to handle crash/recovery
• Integration and tuning of NORM

Spines is an overlay network platform developed at Johns Hopkins University. Spines provides a generic messaging infrastructure for unicast, multicast, and anycast over a dynamic multi-hop network environment and can be used to build overlay networks on top of physical networks. It is within the Spines environment that non-standard, customized routing, transport and other network services can be adapted for specific application and environment needs. Spread Concepts developed and maintains enhanced versions of Spines. Examples of Spread Concepts' work with Spines includes:

• Adaptation to low bandwidth, high latency, high loss MANETs
• Adaptation to high bandwidth WAN networks
• Adaptation to embedded systems
• Feature customization
• Application optimized transport protocol design & development
• Application optimized routing algorithms

Spread Concepts is the developer and maintainer of the Spread toolkit (www.spread.org), a high performance open source group messaging system for local and wide area networks. The Spread Toolkit is in wide use globally across commercial, government, and research environments. The Spread toolkit is renown for its high performance and scale, for its ease of use, and for its rigorous adherence to “group communication semantics”. Examples of Spread’s use include:

• Cloud management
• SCADA systems
• Distributed storage systems and networking hardware
• Financial trading systems
• Web server coordination

Secure Spread adds security protocols to the Spread toolkit. Secure Spread integrates innovative research and the state of the art in the security of distributed systems with a successful widely used messaging and group communication system. The toolkit provides a high performance multicast and group communication service that ensures the confidentiality and integrity of messages, and is resilient to faults across local area or wide area networks.

Replication is a critical tool for providing high availability, survivability and performance. Spread Concepts created high performance, synchronous peer replication tools that automatically handle network partitions, server crashes, and network re-merges. Our innovative replication algorithms maximize scalability and performance without sacrificing consistency guarantees. The Congruity Replication Engine we developed provides optimized and efficient multi-master (peer) replication that supports a range of application semantics. The engine guarantees that all actions are applied at all the replicas in the exact same order, and thus that all replicas remain identical. Congruity enables highly scalable low latency and high throughput replication in environments that may experience server crashes and network partitions.