Seminars & Colloquia
Xiaolan Zhang
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
"Building an Open Virtual Machine Image Library: Security Challenges and Opportunities"
Wednesday April 08, 2009 10:00 AM
Location: 3211, EB II NCSU Centennial Campus
(Visitor parking instructions)
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.
Host: Peng Ning, Computer Science, NCSU