that has become increasingly popular. While it might be easy to think of virtualization as adding a software layer that requires additional controls to maintain security, proponents of virtualization argue that it serves the opposite purpose, and instead represents a core enhancement to security. “The only way we know how to get strong isolation is to keep things simple,” says Mendel Rosenblum, founder of VMware and a professor of computer science at Stanford University. “And the only way we know how to do that is to have isolation enforced at the lowest level.”

Modern operating systems have a high level of functionality—and a corresponding level of complexity and number of potential weaknesses. “I look at virtualization as a step toward getting out of the mess we have in terms of these systems being so insecure,” says Rosenblum, who maintains that better security is a natural result of virtualization. Still, he says, it is incumbent on those working on virtualization to build layers that don’t make virtualized systems so full of features and complex that they become difficult to secure.

Ian Pratt, founder of XenSource and vice president of advanced products at Citrix, has a similar view of virtualization’s relationship to security. “If you look at hypervisors for laptops and phones, it’s not about consolidation,” he says. “It’s about security and being able to secure different partitions on a device.”

Citrix is developing software for a model of mobile computing that the company calls “bring your own computer,” with the idea being for employees to use their own laptop for securely connecting to the corporate network. In this model, the laptop runs a corporate virtual machine directly on top of a hypervisor rather than in a hosted virtual environment contained by the employee’s personal operating system.

“You need to provide very strict isolation between those environments because you really don’t trust the personal environment,” says Pratt. “It is only through using a hypervisor where you can achieve that strong isolation between those environments.”

Like VMware’s Herrod, Pratt points

With virtualization,
people will be able
to use both their
work phone and
home phone on
a single handset.

to smartphones as one manifestation of this new way of thinking about virtualization and security. In Pratt’s example, a handset might have one virtual machine that controls the radio, another that contains all the default software and applications, and a third that operates everything the user downloads and installs. “The whole idea behind this,” says Pratt, “is that because you have this strong isolation, no matter what rubbish you download and install on the phone, you are still going to be able to make that 911 call whenever you need it.”

Proponents of virtualization say that, in addition to facilitating new ways of enforcing security, virtualization technologies are leading to new ways of distributing software. “Virtualization not only gives you the ability to manage hardware more effectively,” says Rosenblum, “but also allows you to treat the software you’re running differently.” One way of leveraging virtualization’s capabilities is to ship complete packages of running virtual machines rather than having users assemble operating systems and applications themselves, he says. The idea represents a different take on software as a service, a model that obviates the need for users to assemble applications themselves. “It’s not like you buy all the separate parts to make a car, but that’s what we do with computers,” says Rosenblum, who predicts that virtualization will lead to users simply invoking complete, authenticated virtual machines tailored to their particular needs.

core challenges

While virtualization is continuing to make inroads in several new areas and

Quantum Computing
Atoms
Teleported

a team of scientists from the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan have successfully teleported information between a pair of atoms, housed in separate and enclosed containers, across a distance of one meter, reports Science. according to the scientists, this is the first time that information has been teleported between two separate atoms in unconnected containers.

With their protocol, the scientists successfully teleported quantum information between two ytterbium ions, using a method of teleportation in which the ions are stimulated to emit photons and the quantum states are inferred from the color of the emissions. the scientists report that atom-to-atom teleported information can be recovered with perfect accuracy approximately 90% of the time, and they believe that figure can be improved.

“our system has the potential to form the basis for a large-scale ‘quantum repeater’ that can network quantum memories over vast distances,” says Christopher Monroe, the team leader and a physics professor at the University of Maryland. “Moreover, our methods can be used in conjunction with quantum bit operations to create a key component needed for quantum computation.

“one particularly attractive aspect of our method is that it combines the unique advantages of both photons and atoms,” says Monroe. “photons are ideal for transferring information fast over long distances, whereas atoms offer a valuable medium for long-lived quantum memory. the combination represents an attractive architecture for a ‘quantum repeater,’ that would allow quantum information to be communicated over much larger distances than can be done with just photons. also, the teleportation of quantum information in this way could form the basis of a new type of quantum internet that could outperform any conventional type of classical network for certain tasks.”