Software Security in Virtualized Infrastructures:
The Smart Meter Example
Bernhard Beckert, Dennis Hofheinz, Jörn Müller-Quade,
Alexander Pretschner, Gregor Snelting
Future infrastructures for energy, traffic, and computing will be
virtualized: they will consist of decentralized, self-organizing,
dynamically adaptive, and open collections of physical resources such
as virtual power plants or computing clouds. Challenges to software
dependability, in particular software security will be enourmous.
While the problems in this domain transcend any specific
instantiation, we use the example of smart power meters to discuss
advanced technologies for the protection of integrity and
confidentiality of software and data in virtualized
infrastructures. We show that approaches based on homomorphic
encryption, deductive verification, information flow control, and
runtime verification are promising candidates for providing solutions
to a plethora of representative challenges in the domain of
virtualized infrastructures.