Experiences in the land of virtual abstractions

Abstract

The Microsoft Research Drawbridge Project began with a simple question: Is it possible to achieve the benefits of hardware virtual machines without the overheads? Following that question, we have built a line of exploratory prototypes. These prototypes range from an ARM-based phone that runs x86 Windows binaries to new forms of secure computation. In this talk, I'll briefly describe our various prototypes and the evidence we have accumulated that our first question can be answered in the affirmative.