Oxford University hosts trusted grid testbed following first European summer school on trusted infrastructure technologies.

Oxford University's Software Engineering Centre hosted this week a summer school for academic researchers in Trusted Computing and related infrastructure security technologies. Following the summer school, a test-bed environment for Trusted Computing and virtualization technology will be built, within Oxford University's Campus Grid.

The event was co-organised by Oxford University and HP Labs Trusted Systems Lab with sponsorship from Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Intel, and Infineon. The goal of the summer school was to provide students and academics with leading edge industry expertise in infrastructure technologies such as trusted computing, virtualization, and networking security, with lectures, research workshops, and practical lab sessions using the latest equipment. After the summer school is over, the equipment used for the practical labs will be used as the start of a testbed set-up for research and collaboration purposes within the Oxford University Campus Grid. The intention will be to demonstrate that nodes can join the grid and have their security verified, thereby giving the grid users confidence that their programs have been run correctly in a secure environment.

The summer school programme brought together some 30 students and 15 academics from across Europe, together with industrial researchers and government decision-makers to understand the latest developments in the field, and to plan a research agenda for the future.

Mark Schiller, director of Trusted Computing Strategy at HP, and president of the Trusted Computing Group, said "Trusted Computing represents an enormous investment to provide security to the future of computing technologies. It is important that it is understood and explored by the academic community, and made broadly accessible to engineering students. The Oxford programme is a good step towards building a European community of expertise around trusted infrastructure technology futures".

The program included lectures on the central Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technologies, from HP Labs and Infineon, the 'chain of trust' from the TPM to application software, from Intel, and Ruhr-University Bochum, on virtualization, from the Xen project at Cambridge University and from HP Labs, on applications, by Microsoft, and the implementation of the TCG's Trusted Network Connect from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hanover.

Dr Andrew Martin, who leads security teaching and research in the Oxford University Software Engineering Centre, and is directing the Summer School, said "I am convinced that Trusted Computing has enormous potential to improve day-to-day security for everyone as well as to enhance scientific applications and grid computing, and to make possible entirely new kinds of distributed application."

Note:

1. Oxford University Software Engineering Centre exists to offer part-time postgraduate courses to practising Software Professionals. 210 industrial software engineers are presently enrolled and working towards a masters' degree. http://www.softeng.ox.ac.uk

2. Oxford University's campus grid utilises spare computing capacity, mainly on desktop computers, spread around the University. As well as providing a single point of access to these disparate resources it also allows seamless access to the University's super-computing facilities and further afield to the resources of the UK National Grid Service. It currently includes approximately 1000 CPUs, available for scientists and others in the University and elsewhere to submit computationally-intensive jobs, and is managed by the Oxford e-Research Centre. http://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/

3. The Summer School home page is at: www.softeng.ox.ac.uk/trusted

4. For more information, contact: Dr Andrew Martin. [e-mail] 01865 283521