Protected Execution Facility - Guerney D. H. Hunt, IBM Research
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2018-10-27

Protected Execution Facility - Guerney D. H. Hunt, IBM Research 

(Guerney Hunt, IBM Research): Security remains a key concern for both traditional and cloud computing workloads. One objective is keeping applications (or containers) secure in the presence of attacks or compromised components. This talk addresses these challenges on the Power Architecture by presenting the Protected Execution Facility ― an architecture modification for IBM Linux and OpenPower Linux servers ― along with the associated firmware, the Protected Execution Ultravisor which provides additional security to virtual machines ― called secure virtual machines (SVMs). Protected Execution Facility concurrently supports both normal VMs and SVMs. The protections provided to SVMs and some restrictions for SVMs are covered. The differences and similarities between vendor approaches to providing security in the presence of a potentially compromised hypervisor or OS will be reviewed. 

About Guerney Hunt
Dr. Guerney D. H. Hunt has been a Research Staff Member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center since 1995. He is currently working on transferring security technology into IBM products, and developing additional security technology. He participated in a team funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the Canadian government to develop an end-to-end security architecture. He has been working on developing architectural changes that can be used to increase the security of computer systems since 2008. He joined IBM Research in 1995 in the distributed computing group where he became the co-inventor of layer seven scaling technology. He has worked in the secure intermediary infrastructures, advanced cluster systems, and distributed infrastructure groups before joining the Security Research Department in 2008. He was also the PI of the Next Generation Secure Computer Architecture exploratory research project. He has work on blockchain security. Prior to IBM Research, Dr. Hunt work in IBM development from 1981-1983 and he worked for NCR from 1975-1981. His earlier work was in software and microcode development, IBM product engineering, and OS development for VM/370. Since joining IBM Research he has held management and non management positions.

His first conference presentation was at WWW7 in Brisbane Australia in 1998. He also did a poster session at SOSP XVII in 1999. Since that time, he has done multiple customer, business and conference presentations.
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Dr. Hunt holds a BS in mathematics from Michigan Technological University and an MS and Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM, was a founding member of the editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing, he holds more than 21 US and foreign patents, has published papers, and has been an IBM Master Inventor. CV available upon request.