"Hongyi Liu, Ang Chen and Team Advance Cloud Security in USENIX Security Paper"
Hongyi Liu, a computer science Ph.D. student at Rice University, uses a novel method to deploy cloud devices as security enforcers. The Ph.D. student became a member of the computer science research group led by Ang Chen, and contributed to four co-authored papers. He will present the team's most recent findings, "Remote Direct Memory Introspection," at the 2023 USENIX Security conference. The USENIX Security paper explored how to improve the security of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), a widely used cloud technology. Programmable network devices were used to create in-network security support in this work. As they learned how programmable network devices could be used to further secure RDMA connections in the cloud, they wondered if the newly-secured RDMA NIC could help ensure the security of their host. Their research led to the development of Remote Direct Memory Introspection (RDMI) and an even greater vision, which is to further improve cloud security by delegating security tasks to hardware substrates, consisting of cloud-available equipment that had not been previously considered a policing or enforcing agent. This article continues to discuss the work that advances cloud security.