Pebbles: fine-grained data management abstractions for modern operating systems
Riley Spahn, Jonathan Bell, Michael Z. Lee, Sravan Bhamidipati, Roxana Geambasu, Gail E. Kaiser · 2014
Support for fine-grained data management has all but disappeared from modern operating systems such as An-droid and iOS. Instead, we must rely on each individual application to manage our data properly – e.g., to delete our emails, documents, and photos in full upon request; to not collect more data than required for its function; and to back up our data to reliable backends. Yet, re-search studies and media articles constantly remind us of the poor data management practices applied by our appli-cations. We have developed Pebbles, a fine-grained data management system that enables management at a pow-erful new level of abstraction: application-level data ob-jects, such as emails, documents, notes, notebooks, bank accounts, etc. The key contribution is Pebbles’s ability to discover such high-level objects in arbitrary applica-tions without requiring any input from or modifications to these applications. Intuitively, it seems impossible for an OS-level service to understand object structures in unmodified applications, however we observe that the high-level storage abstractions embedded in modern OSes – relational databases and object-relational map-pers – bear significant structural information that makes object recognition possible and accurate. 1