Cloud computing is growing because of cost advantages and convenience it offers to customers. However, security and privacy continue to be major concerns. We wish to guard against a powerful adversary who can compromise the CloudOS, and uses all privileges of the CloudOS to compromise the integrity and confidentiality of user applications. Secure hardware and/or small trusted hypervisors are the main weapons in our arsenal to guard against such powerful adversaries. Secure hardware (such as Intel SGX) enables user mode applications to package code and data into regions that are isolated from all other software running on the machine. Isolated regions can also be implemented with a small trusted hypervisor. However, it is an open research question as to how entire cloud services can be built using trusted hardware as a primitive, while maintaining a small TCB, providing good performance and end-to-end security guarantees. The Trusted Cloud project at Microsoft Research explores ways to answer this question, and it builds on techniques spanning hardware, OS, compilers and verification tools. In this talk, I will describe our efforts on architecting trusted and more secure cloud services using these principles. (Collaboration with Manuel Costa and several colleagues across MSR and Azure)
Towards the end of the talk, I will give a short overview of Microsoft Research India, the areas we work in, and invite students to apply for internships, postdoctoral and full-time positions.
Sriram Rajamani is Managing Director of Microsoft Research India. His research interests are in designing, building and analyzing computer systems in a principled manner. Over the years he has worked on various topics including Hardware and Software Verification, Type Systems, Language Design, Distributed Systems, Security and Privacy, Cloud Security and Probabilistic Programming.
Together with Tom Ball, he was awarded the CAV 2011 Award for “contributions to software model checking, specifically the development of the SLAM/SDV software model checker that successfully demonstrated computer-aided verification techniques on real programs.” Sriram was recently elected ACM Fellow for contributions to software analysis and defect detection
Sriram has a PhD from UC Berkeley, MS from University of Virginia and BEng from College of Engineering, Guindy, all with specialization in Computer Science. Sriram was general chair for POPL 2015 in India, and was program Co-Chair for CAV 2005. He co-founded the Mysore Park Series, and the ISEC conference series in India. He served on the CACM editorial board till recently.