Modular Research-Based Composably Trustworthy Mission-Oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC2)

Abstract : This is the final report for our (MRC) 2 project, culminating a four-year research and development effort that has investigated clean-slate secure networking and security for cloud computing and cloud storage, with emphasis on resilience and trustworthiness. The MRC2 project was a joint effort between SRI International and the University of Cambridge. The project focused on switching, software-defined networking, and application dataflow in datacenters, with a number of subtended efforts including aligning algorithm and network topology, achieving greater energy efficiency, understanding the concomitant security tradeoffs, exploring multi-scale computing techniques (including work on multi-threaded and multi-core CHERI), and developing capability-based system-oriented application security models. We have extended Cambridges CIEL distributed computing environment to address security, incorporating the lightweight Mirage OS operating system, and also developed Dios a distributed operating system. Dios provides robustness as well as security and compartmentalization, and uses properties of CIEL computations to drive resource allocation, protection, and monitoring at the datacenter scale.