Software Security in Virtualized Infrastructures. The Smart Meter Example

Future infrastructures for energy, traffic, and computing will be virtualized:They will consist of decentralized, self-organizing, dynamically adaptive, and open collections of physical resources such as virtual power plants or computing clouds.Challenges to software dependability, in particular software security will be enourmous. While the problems in this domain transcend any specific instantiation, we use the example of smart power meters to discuss advanced technologies for the protection of integrity and confidentiality of software and data in virtualized infrastructures.We show that approaches based on homomorphic encryption, deductive verification, information flow control, and runtime verification are promising candidates for providing solutions to a plethora of representative challenges in the domain of virtualized infrastructures.