Lind: Challenges turning virtual composition into reality @ FreeCo 2011

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Security is a constant sore spot in application development. Applications now need structural support for better isolation and security on a domain specific basis to stave off the multitude of modern security vulnerabilities. Currently, application developers have been relying upon cumbersome workarounds to address these issues. We propose the design and initial implementation details for Lind, a highly flexible composition infrastructure that can be well-integrated with modern application development processes and extends traditional mechanisms like virtualization and software fault isolation in a way that can be tailored according to an application’s need. Lind does this by providing the structures and services needed to build a virtual component model. Since compositions of virtual components are different than current software systems, building and using virtual component models provides a new set of software engineering challenges in composition and system construction. As a possible solution to many modern security problems, it is important to understand how virtual component models can be evaluated, to further both the user’s understanding of them, and future research in this area. This paper proposes a design and implementation strategy for components that run in isolation. Then the paper presents an evaluation of the efficacy of this approach in terms of performance, isolation, security and composition provides insight into the possible advantages and disadvantages of a virtual component model.