I'm sure that many of you are sick and tired to carry their laptops during your trips. Of course, you can use a USB key ring to carry your data to access it from any other PC. But what about having a handheld device, such as an iPod, containing the full image of your computing environment, and restoring this whole environment on another PC anywhere in the world? Thanks to researchers from IBM, it is now possible to use the SoulPad system, a portable device carrying a stack of software. The host PC, which can be of any variety, "boots an auto-configuring operating system (Knoppix) from the SoulPad, starts a virtual machine monitor, and resumes a suspended virtual machine that has the user's entire personal computing environment." Now, the IBM team is thinking to use cell phones as well to carry the SoulPad system as soon as they have enough disk storage capacity. This day, it will feel easier to travel.
Before going further, here is a diagram showing the multi-tiered architecture of the SoulPad (Credit: IBM Research).
Here are more details from IBM Research.
Essentially, SoulPad enables a user to hibernate a PC session to a pocket form-factor device and carry the device to some another PC and resume his session on that PC. SoulPad has minimal dependencies on PCs that can be used to resume a user session.
In specific, PCs are neither required to be network connected, nor have any pre-installed software. The only requirement is the support of a high speed local connection to a SoulPad device for an acceptable suspend/resume times and acceptable runtime performance.
The researchers note that their approach is very different from the Intel's Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) project because SoulPad doesn't require a known stack of software on the second PC.
As you might guess, the second PC doesn't boot instantaneously. But suspending and restoring times are very similar to the time it takes for your laptop to move to hibernating mode, about 2 minutes using a USB 2.0 connection.
And what about security if your SoulPad is stolen?
To protect user data if a SoulPad is misplaced or stolen, we encrypt the disk partition that holds the VM images using the AES128 block cipher. We used the publicly available loop-aes package for Linux in our implementation.
A worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
The encryption key is generated by hashing a usersupplied passphrase. After the Host OS boots, it prompts the user to enter the passphrase. If the user supplies an incorrect passphrase, the resulting hash will not correspond to the AES key and the mount operation will fail since the decrypted data will not correspond to a valid filesystem. In order to defeat brute force attacks that attempt to guess the passphrase, the loop-aes package requires the passphrase to be at least 20 characters long. For convenience, we permit users to supply this passphrase via an auxiliary USB flash key.
But will a friend allow you to use his PC? You can tell him that the SoulPad system doesn't touch anything on his machine and will not leave any traces either.
The SoulPad project was presented at MobiSys 2005, the Usenix Third Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, which was held on June 6-8, 2005, in Seattle, WA.
The researchers received an award for Best Paper for "Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads." Here are two links to the abstract and to the full paper (PDF format, 14 pages, 187 KB).
The IBM Research site also provides a link to a video showing how the SoulPad concept works (5 minutes and 53 seconds, 14 MB).
Finally, you might want to read two other articles about the SoulPad project, "System carries PC soul" from Technology Research News and "Pocket-sized computer 'soul' developed" from New Scientist.
Sources: IBM Research Project page about SoulPad, 2005; and various web sites
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Computers
Handhelds
IBM
Innovation
Pervasive Computing
Software
Technology
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