Sreekanth Ramakrishna Iyer

Standards Based Integration of Advanced Key Management Capabilities with Openstack

The majority of the IT world is currently shifting to cloud platforms, and this calls for a greater measure of security for clouds. The emphasis for security originates from the need to transfer data across or within clouds without a third party being able to access the transferred information. This data is encrypted and decrypted using keys and is managed by Key Lifecycle Managers (KLMs) which communicate using a standardized protocol. Thus, to provide end user flexibility which helps in choosing the most reliable KLM, it is essential for cloud platforms to provide support for a standardized protocol so as to allow integration with external Key Lifecycle Managers.

Building Resilient Cloud over Unreliable Commodity Infrastructure

Cloud Computing has emerged as a successful computing paradigm for efficiently utilizing managed compute infrastructure such as high speed rack-mounted servers, connected with high speed networking, and reliable storage. Usually such infrastructure is dedicated, physically secured and has reliable power and networking infrastructure. However, much of our idle compute capacity is present in unmanaged infrastructure like idle desktops, lab machines, physically distant server machines, and laptops. We present a scheme to utilize this idle compute capacity on a best-effort basis and provide high availability even in face of failure of individual components or facilities. We run virtual machines on the commodity infrastructure and present a cloud interface to our end users. The primary challenge is to maintain availability in the presence of node failures, network failures, and power failures. We run multiple copies of a Virtual Machine (VM) redundantly on geographically dispersed physical machines to achieve availability. If one of the running copies of a VM fails, we seamlessly switchover to another running copy. We use Virtual Machine Record/Replay capability to implement this redundancy and switchover. In current progress, we have implemented VM Record/Replay for uniprocessor machines over Linux/KVM and are currently working on VM Record/Replay on shared-memory multiprocessor machines. We report initial experimental results based on our implementation.