From the Forum sessions that were hosted at the OpenInfra Summit Berlin 2022, this session was to collect feedback and provide for discussions on the next steps for emulated architecture support within the cloud.
Forum Description:
Critical infrastructure, running operational technology (OT), runs on esoteric ISA's (arm, ppc, mips, sparc, cris, blackfin, etc.) that have been poorly documented, and were designed by companies who have since gone out of business, or can extraordinarily be expensive to acquire. At the same time many cloud infrastructures support orchestration but not using QEMU and libvirt when the host ISA does not match the guest ISA, making techniques like distributed fuzzing significantly more difficult in regards to OT platforms. The QEMU project can emulate some of these ISA's; however, they receive an order of magnitude less development attention than i386/amd64 and can be extremely difficult to configure correctly. Our goal is to ensure that libvirt no longer assumes that the host ISA equals the guest ISA and will intelligently choose the QEMU binary based on the reported architecture of a given image allowing for cloud orchestration.
Forum Speaker:
Jonathan Race
Cyber Range Engineer
Georgia Cyber Center / Augusta University
