Simon Crosby – Keynote

Biography

Simon Crosby is the co–founder and CTO of Bromium. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of XenSource prior to its acquisition by Citrix. He then served as the CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix. Previously, Simon was a principal engineer at Intel, where he led strategic research in distributed autonomic computing, platform security and trust. He was also the founder of CPlane, a network-optimization software vendor. Prior to CPlane, Simon was a tenured faculty member at the University of Cambridge, where he led research on network performance and control, and multimedia operating systems. In 2007, Simon was awarded a coveted spot as one of InfoWorld’s Top 25 CTOs.

Presentation Title

Presentation: Micro-virtualization: CPU-enforced security & privacy for an era of cloud and mobility

Presentation Overview

The rapid adoption of cloud computing has been paralleled by profound changes in end-user computing: Mobility, consumerization, and the “untrusted web” lead inexorably toward a stark reality: IT is losing control over enterprise computing. Users need to access enterprise-hosted applications as well as SaaS apps and the consumer web, but today’s end points are impossible to defend – making them the perfect vector for a sophisticated attacker seeking access to enterprise applications and networks. When a device is compromised all data on the device and every cloud-hosted application to which the client connects can be attacked. The end-point is the easy way into a “secure” cloud. This talk will present an architecture for secure mobility that can make any device (PC, Mac, tablet) secure by design, on any network, and when accessing any application. Our approach is based on micro-virtualization – which uses a specialized hypervisor, called a Microvisor, together with CPU features for virtualization, to hardware-isolate individual user tasks (each domain or document accessed). The talk will describe the specialized Xen® hypervisor, called a Microvisor, required to deliver on our goals, and will cover components for multi-domain security, secure mobility and safe collaboration. In our architecture, hardware-isolated micro-VMs ensure security and privacy of the system overall, and for each domain. Malware is unable to escape isolation into the system as a whole or to gain access to any high value networks or applications. Micro-VMs are unaware of each other, and execute in a least- privilege environment, with no access to data or sites other than those specifically required for their task. They are automatically erased when the user ends the task, eliminating all malware. Sharing between tasks requires user direction that can be precisely controlled by policy. A key benefit of the approach is that it not only secures the device, without any need to detect malware, but it also allows the device to attest to its secure posture during authentication, as the user connects to an enterprise network or application, for example using the FIDO protocol or IF-MAP. In addition it has an ability to ensure continued compliance with enterprise policy – controlling access to enterprise content based on arbitrary policies, while providing continued assurance to IT departments.