CSC801: Seminar in Computer Science (Spring 2009)
Date: Wednesday April 8, 2009
Time: 10:00 AM
Place: 3211, EB 2; NCSU Centennial Campus
Speaker: Xiaolan (Catherine) Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Building an Open Virtual Machine Image Library: Security Challenges and Opportunities
Abstract: We have undoubtedly entered an era of vitual computing. Virtual Machine (VM) technology allows a complete software stack (OS and applications) to be conveniently encapsulated in a VM image which can be distributed like a file and runs on any physical machine that provides a compatible Virtual Machine monitor. It is a fundamental technological enabler for building more elaborate computing services such as a cloud.
The Mirage team at IBM Research, together with several institutional partners, has launched an ambitious project that aims to develop a massively-scalable virtual machine image library for archiving and sharing of pre-configured software environments, accessible to anyone over the Web. The library will be cloud-agnostic, enabling the images be executed on any compute cloud that implements certain standardized deployment and monitoring interfaces, and compatibility with open-standard image formats. The image library infrastructure will serve as a research testbed for exploring new problems in search, security, maintenance, and licensing that arise in the management of a large-scale publicly-accessible virtual machine image collection.
In this talk I will outline the security challenges and opportunities in building such an open VM image library, and present some preliminary yet promising results.
Short Bio: Xiaolan (Catherine) Zhang has been with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center since 2001, conducting research on secure systems. Her current interests include security and virtualization, trusted computing, and software security. She received Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2001 from Harvard University.