CSE Colloquium: Indrakshi Ray

Indrakshi Ray, Professor, Colorado State University

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

1:30 – 2:30pm

HBL Class of 1947 Conference room

(located behind Bookworms in the Library)

Title: Access Control across Isolated Containerized Environments in Linux

With the advancements in contemporary multi-core CPU architectures, it is now possible for a server operating system (OS), such as Linux, to handle a large number of concurrent application services on a single server instance. Individual application components of such services may run in different isolated runtime environments, such as chrooted jails or application containers, and may need access to system resources and the ability to collaborate and coordinate with each other in a regulated and secure manner.  We propose an access control framework for policy formulation, management, and enforcement that allows access to OS resources and also permits controlled collaboration and coordination for service components running in disjoint containerized environments under a single Linux OS server instance. We formalize the notion of policy classes for handling the different types of access. The policy classes are managed and enforced through a Linux Policy Machine (LPM) that acts as the centralized reference monitor and provides access to system resources and allows controlled sharing of resources across containerized environments. We present the main ideas of our framework and also discuss the preliminary implementation to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

Biography: Indrakshi Ray is a Professor in Computer Science at Colorado State University.  She has been a visiting faculty at Air Force Research Laboratory, Naval Research Laboratory, and at INRIA, Rocquencourt, France. She obtained her Ph.D. from George Mason University.

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