IBM announces sHype

Quoting from the IBM official announcement:

The IBM secure hypervisor architecture, or “sHype,” is a Research technology designed to run in conjunction with commercial and open source hypervisors that control servers and data in a shared environment. sHype aims to provide a security “wrapper” around distributed workloads in the data center, extending mainframe-like security to pooled data and resources across multiple IBM and non-IBM systems.

sHype is designed to bring stronger security guarantees to popular x86 and blade servers. As is increasingly common, IBM Research developed the sHype technology not just in its own labs, but implementing early versions of sHype with customers to test and evaluate the code. Additionally, portions of sHype have been contributed to the Open Source community and are being used, for example, as part of the open source Xen hypervisor kernel.

sHype works in conjunction with hypervisors by establishing a virtual machine to act as a data center “security foreman.” The foreman uses preset configurations, business policies and exceptions set by the customer to lock down all content of the data center. It then automatically sets policies that evaluate, rank and code workloads as well as the physical and virtual resources needed to run each workload. Once workloads and resources are locked together, the integrity of the data and resources is assured and can be better managed by hypervisors accordingly…