Xen Community Spotlight

Rainer Sailer, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Reiner Sailer is a Research Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York, since 1999. His major research interests include designing robust security into virtualization environments such as Xen and exploring use cases for Trusted Computing. He has been working for two years on the Xen mandatory access control framework, which controls sharing of data between guest domains by mediating any communication between guest domains and by mediating access to shared resources. Looking forward onto the completion of this framework within the next 2 months, Reiner has been moving towards usability aspects of the security framework. He currently prepares a GUI-based application that helps users to enforce the isolation of distributed workloads running within Xen guest domains. Anticipating the need for co-operation of security functions in the virtualization environment and within operating systems, Reiner is exploring theory and practice of layering security mechanisms and policies during his research time.