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.
