Mindcastle.io: Secure Distributed Block Device for Edge and Cloud

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 4:10 pm4:35 pm

Jacob Gorm Hansen, Vertigo.ai

Abstract: 

Camera-based smart IoT sensors are soon going to be everywhere. The recent success of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has opened the door to a new computer vision and AI applications. While initial deployments are using high-end server class hardware with expensive and power-hungry GPUs, optimizations and algorithmic improvements will soon make running the inference side of DNNs on low-cost Edge Computing devices commonplace. These devices will need software, and this software needs to be continually updated, both to keep track with the rapid development within machine learning/AI methods and datasets, and to keep their operating system and middleware installs tamper-proof and secure. To this end, we have been building Mindcastle, a serverless distributed block storage system with strong cryptographic integrity, built-in compression, and incremental atomic updates. Mindcastle is based on a highly performant and flash friendly LSM-like data structure, first developed at Bromium where it served as the storage foundation Bromium's Xen-derived uXen hypervisor, and has hosted millions of strongly isolated Micro-VMs across many security-sensitive installations worldwide.

Jacob Gorm Hansen, Vertigo.ai

Jacob Gorm Hansen is the founder of Vertigo.ai, an AI startup that focuses on AI for Edge computing. Jacob has a long track record of innovative computer systems development and research. After cutting his teeth as a senior programmer on the Hitman games francise, he returned to academia, where first major research contribution, the award-winning “VM live migration” technique for uninterrupted relocation of workloads in a data center became an enabling technology of cloud computing, which deployed by all major cloud providers today. His research into distributed storage systems was the enabler of VMware's VSAN business unit, and the IO efficiency and memory compression algorithmic breakthroughs he made at Bromium made strong virtualization-backed endpoint security more efficient than unsecured native execution. Jacob holds a BA in psychology, a BS, MSc and a Ph.D. in computer science, all from the University of Copenhagen, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Washington. Jacob has published several papers on computer systems, and holds a number of US patents. He is a receipient of the the EuroSys Roger Needham Ph.D. award, and co-author of the USENIX Test-of-Time Awarded "Live Migration of Virtual Machines" USENIX NSDI paper, for which his Master's thesis served as inspiration. Jacob has given invited talks at Invited lectures at the universities of Aalborg, Aaarhus, Dresden, Erlangen, Potsdam, Washington, Trinity College Dublin, at numerous VMware engineerign events and off-sites, at Bell Labs Dublin, and at Microsoft Research labs in Seattle, Silicon Valley and Cambridge, UK.

BibTeX
@conference {230028,
author = {Jacob Gorm Hansen},
title = {Mindcastle.io: Secure Distributed Block Device for Edge and Cloud},
year = {2019},
address = {Boston, MA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}

Presentation Video