Our lives are changing every day because of the way that we interact in the virtual landscape. Kerry Long, a program manager at IARPA, shares what his team is working on to make cloud computing more secure now and in the future. One reason he loves the cloud environment is because of its flexibility and the ability to innovate. Computer engineers are now able to resolve cyber risks much easier than in traditional computing infrastructures. Kerry dives into what it means to be in this human domain, how cybersecurity is evolving, and what this means for the cyber community, businesses, and individuals. He also discusses the IARPA VirtUE program and how virtuous user environments need to change to mitigate breaches.
Kerry Long’s role at IARPA is to make the Intelligence Community more secure in the tech world. His vision of the future of cloud computing is to fundamentally change the way we use computers to be more secure. His hope is to redesign how all of us interact with computers to get ahead of hackers and breaches. His program, VirtUE, will soon be released to the world as open source code to promote cloud security and ingenuity. He also philosophizes about what cyber space really means as the only truly human-created domain.
When asked what is the most critical aspect of cloud security, Mr. Long answered, “Depending on users to secure their environment.” The current shared service model has cloud hosts providing a hypervisor (or virtual machine monitor [VMM]) and physical security of the data center while the user is responsible for their own data security. Most users are not security experts and they shouldn’t be, as Long argues that the cloud providers need to take on more security responsibilities. He points out that small-to-medium-sized businesses rarely have adequate IT resources to properly secure their own servers and, therefore, the cloud is a much more secure option because of hypervisors and other systems being updated nearly every day.
Long goes on to detail how we build things without knowing the ramifications because engineers can’t fathom every possible way a user would or could use it. The problem with pre-cloud computing is that we were stuck with those decisions for decades. “What I love about the cloud is it constantly gives you a chance to do-over.The cloud is anything that we want it to be. The cloud providers change out their infrastructure every 18 months to two years with brand new hardware. They are innovating and adding new things every week, every two weeks, and taking things out that don’t work. It’s an amazing opportunity as an engineer to say ‘hey, actually I thought I was smart, but I’m smarter now.’
VirtUE (Virtuous User Environment) is an IARPA program managed by Mr. Kerry Long that is an example of using the cloud and re-engineering it to be more secure for tomorrow. Traditional memory computers are running too many roles at once while in comparison cloud computing can separate roles. VirtUE is trying to engineer ways to make the separate environments function seamlessly for users while maintaining the security. This program is coming to an end soon, and will be released as open source code for the world to examine and work on.
VirtUE is related to SCITE (Scientific advances to Continuous Insider Threat Evaluation)
Link to IARPA: www.iarpa.gov IARPA facilitates the transition of research results to their Intelligence Community customers for operational application.
Link to IARPA profile for Kerry Long: https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/20-program-managers
Mr. Kerry Long’s Research Areas at IARPA: Cloud security, evolving security using the technologies of the Cloud, hypervisor security and instrumentation, novel operating system monitoring techniques, malicious cyber behavior detection analytics, edge computing
TIME STAMPS
00:07 Cloud Computing
01:11 Who is Kerry Long, IARPA, Cybersecurity
02:00 Mission of IARPA
02:45 Cloud Security and Potential of Cloud Computing
03:59 Getting Ahead of Security Breaches
05:35 What is the most critical aspect of cloud security?
07:11 Cloud security options for businesses and individuals
09:58 What data is at risk of being stolen?
12:38 Cyber Engineering
13:50 Cloud Engineering & Infrastructure
15:18 What is a VirtUE – Virtuous User Environment?
18:59 How Safe is our Cyber Community?
21:00 Redesigning Computing with the Cloud
23:22 The Future of Computing
24:18 VirtUE as Open Source