CSC News

NC State Led Collaboration to Study Trustworthy Cloud Computing

Dr. Peng Ning, associate professor, Dr. Xuxian Jiang, assistant professor, and Dr. Mladen Vouk, professor and department head of the computer science department at NC State University, have been awarded $1,523,686 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support their research proposal titled “Collaborative Research: Trustworthy Cloud Computing.”

The award will run from September 15, 2009 to August 31, 2013.

This is a collaborative project involving NC State, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke and NC A&T.  The total amount of the award is $2,999,901.  NC State is the lead institution.

Abstract - Virtual cloud computing is emerging as a promising solution to IT management to both ease the provisioning and administration of complex hardware and software systems and reduce the operational costs. With the industry’s continuous investment (e.g., Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing, IBM Blue Cloud), virtual cloud computing is likely to be a major component of the future IT solution, which will have significant impact on almost all sectors of society. The trustworthiness of virtual cloud computing is thus critical to the well-being of all organizations or individuals that will rely on virtual cloud computing for their IT solutions.

This project envisions trustworthy virtual cloud computing and investigates fundamental research issues leading to this vision.  Central to this vision is a new security architecture, which harnesses new opportunities and capabilities such as built-in out-of-band system access, processor and hardware support for trusted computing, and out-of-box examination by hypervisors. This project focuses on key research issues following this security architecture, including new security services that enhance the trustworthiness of virtual cloud computing, protection of management infrastructure against malicious workloads, and protection of hosted workloads from potentially malicious management infrastructure.  The research will enable the adoption of virtual cloud computing for critical IT management in industry and government organizations. This project will involve both graduate and undergraduate students, and will produce open source software and tools, which will be made available to the public. This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

For more information on Dr. Ning, click here.

For more information on Dr. Jiang, click here.

For more information on Dr. Vouk, click here.

~coates~