HP building a trusted "bare metal hypervisor"

Posted by Ken Y-N on November 25th, 2009 at 03:56pm

Channel Register recently had a look at the state of play in the virtualisation world, which included this interesting fact:

Richard Brown from HP Labs says they have come up with the idea of a bare metal hypervisor which is integrated with a trusted computing module (TCM) fitted to the system the hypervisor is running. The aim is to help prevent "botnets and trojans in the dark archives of users’ machines".

I haven’t a clue what a TCM might be, other than a newly-invented abbreviation for Trusted Computing Group Trusted Platform Module (TCG TPM). The rest of the mention of the work of HP Labs Bristol is rather vague, but a quick search turns up a much better article on the topic straight from HP:

Thanks to the Trusted Platform Module, says Brown, "you can always measure that this hypervisor has not been compromised, which in turn enables a company’s network to validate that the work environment executing on it is properly configured and isolated from any personal operating system running on the same PC."

The above Trusted Virtualized Client was developed as part of the OpenTC project, a European initiative that also spawned the openSUSE Linux distribution.

Tags: channel register, hp, opentc

Under Virtualisation Tags: channel register, hp, opentc