While Cloud Computing offers increased business agility and reduced cost, many are worried about security: loss of control and lack of confidentiality. Presented by Alon Hazy and Jakob Illeborg Pagter, this talk looks at the threat landscape, then examines how to secure cloud solutions today and in the future.
The authors, from Intel, offer a three pronged approach to providing secure transmission of high volume HTML traffic: new CPU instructions to accelerate cryptographic operations; a novel implementation of the RSA algorithm to accelerate public key encryption; and using SMT to balance web server and cryptographic operations. Their approach, they claim, leads to significant cost savings.
In a recent MSDN article entitled Crypto Services and Data Security in Windows Azure, Jonathan Wiggs provides advice on securing data stored and processed through Windows Azure. InfoQ explored the topic in more detail to understand some of the security ramifications which come with deploying an application to the cloud.
David Durham, manager of Intel's Security and Cryptography Research group, was recently interviewed on the subject of Internet and Computer Security. The interview covers a wide range of topics including the "monetization of malware," Cloud-based detection of malware, security of data stored in the Cloud, "Botnets in the Dark Cloud," and malware as a tool in geo-politics.
The JRuby team has added Ruby 1.8.7 compatibility to the current JRuby trunk. Android received some more attention with JRuby support for the Android Scripting Environment as well as a JRuby irb app. Also: the bcrypt-ruby library for hashing passwords is now available for JRuby, as well as Ruby 1.9.
