Abstract:
Resource virtualization presents opportunities to address security challenges in computer systems by enforcing isolation while preserving the ability to support existing, unmodified applications. In this talk I will overview past and on-going research on virtual networks and two key applications in distributed systems: virtual private clusters for high-throughput computing, and social VPNs for collaboration and sharing among end users. Virtual private clusters integrate virtual machine appliances and self-configuring IP-over-P2P virtual networks to enable homogeneously configured virtual clusters on top of heterogeneous infrastructures. The focus is on environments where users and groups wish to deploy distributed systems where they trust the underlying resource providers (local or "cloud") but wish to be strongly isolated from other users. Social VPNs also build on isolation and self-configuring features of IP-over-P2P virtual networks, integrating fully decentralized techniques for discovery, routing, NAT traversal and private tunnel establishment. The main objective of a social VPN system is to securely interconnect Internet users, where peer-to-peer IP-layer virtual network tunnel links are created, automatically, as a result of relationships established through online social networks. This talk will cover the architecture and highlight quantitative and qualitative results of experiments with deployments of our systems in wide-area networks.

Biography:
Renato J. Figueiredo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Florida (UF), and UF site director of the NSF I/UCRC Center for Autonomic Computing. Dr. Figueiredo received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Universidade de Campinas in 1994 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2001. From 2001 until 2002 he was on the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois. His research interests are in the areas of virtualization, distributed systems, overlay networks, computer architecture, and operating systems.