We present MediaPod, a portable system that allows mobile users to maintain the same persistent, personalized multimedia desktop environment on any available computer. Regardless of which computer is being used, MediaPod provides a consistent multimedia desktop session, maintaining all of a user's applications, documents and configuration settings. This is achieved by leveraging rapid improvements in capacity, cost, and size of portable storage devices. MediaPod provides a virtualization and checkpoint-restart mechanism that decouples a desktop environment and its applications from the host, enabling multimedia desktop sessions to be suspended to portable storage, carried around, and resumed from the storage device on another computer. MediaPod virtualization also isolates desktop sessions from the host, protecting the privacy of the user and preventing malicious applications from damaging the host. We have implemented a Linux MediaPod prototype and demonstrate its ability to quickly suspend and resume multimedia desktop sessions, enabling a seamless computing experience for mobile users as they move among computers.

The increasing centralization of networked services places user data at considerable risk. For example, many users store email on remote servers rather than on their local disk. Doing so allows users to gain the benefit of regular backups and remote access, but it also places a great deal of unwarranted trust in the server. Since most email is stored in plaintext, a compromise of the server implies the loss of confidentiality and integrity of the email stored therein. Although users could employ an end-to-end encryption scheme (e.g., PGP), such measures are not widely adopted, require action on the sender side, only provide partial protection (the email headers remain in the clear), and prevent the users from performing some common operations, such as server-side search. To address this problem, we present secure searchable automated remote email storage (SSARES), a novel system that offers a practical approach to both securing remotely stored email and allowing privacy-preserving search of that email collection. Our solution encrypts email (the headers, body, and attachments) as it arrives on the server using public-key encryption. SSARES uses a combination of identity based encryption and bloom filters to create a searchable index. This index reveals little information about search keywords and queries, even against adversaries that compromise the server. SSARES remains largely transparent to both the sender and recipient.

As users interact with the world and their peers through their computers, it is becoming important to archive and later search the information that they have viewed. We present DejaView, a personal virtual computer recorder that provides a complete record of a desktop computing experience that a user can playback, browse, search, and revive seamlessly. DejaView records visual output, checkpoints corresponding application and file system state, and captures displayed text with contextual information to index the record. A user can then browse and search the record for any visual information that has been displayed on the desktop, and revive and interact with the desktop computing state corresponding to any point in the record. DejaView combines display, operating system, and file system virtualization to provide its functionality transparently without any modifications to applications, window systems, or operating system kernels. We have implemented DejaView and evaluated its performance on real-world desktop applications. Our results demonstrate that DejaView can provide continuous low-overhead recording without any user noticeable performance degradation, and allows browsing, search and playback of records fast enough for interactive use.

We present DeskPod, a portable system that provides a highly reliable desktop computing environment for mobile users by leveraging rapid improvements in capacity, cost, and size of portable storage devices. DeskPod enables a user's live computing environment to be suspended to portable storage, carried around, easily copied for fault-resilience, and resumed from the storage device to provide the user with the same persistent, personalized computing environment on another computer DeskPod achieves this by providing a virtualization and checkpoint/restart mechanism that decouples a desktop computing environment from any single hardware device so that it can be stored and executed anywhere, improving desktop computing reliability by eliminating a potential single point of failure. We have implemented a Linux DeskPod prototype and demonstrate its ability to quickly suspend and resume desktop sessions, enabling a seamless mobile experience

We present WebPod, a portable system that enables mobile users to use the same persistent, personalized web browsing session on any Internet-enabled device. No matter what computer is being used, WebPod provides a consistent browsing session, maintaining all of a user's plugins, bookmarks, browser web content, open browser windows, and browser configuration options and preferences. This is achieved by leveraging rapid improvements in capacity, cost, and size of portable storage devices. WebPod provides a virtualization and checkpoint/restart mechanism that decouples the browsing environment from the host, enabling web browsing sessions to be suspended to portable storage, carried around, and resumed from the storage device on another computer. WebPod virtualization also isolates web browsing sessions from the host, protecting the browsing privacy of the user and preventing malicious web content from damaging the host. We have implemented a Linux WebPod prototype and demonstrate its ability to quickly suspend and resume web browsing sessions, enabling a seamless web browsing experience for mobile users as they move among computers.

We present MobiDesk, a mobile virtual desktop computing hosting infrastructure that leverages continued improvements in network speed, cost, and ubiquity to address the complexity, cost, and mobility limitations of today's personal computing infrastructure. MobiDesk transparently virtualizes a user's computing session by abstracting underlying system resources in three key areas: display, operating system, and network. It provides a thin virtualization layer that decouples a user's computing session from any particular end-user device, and moves all application logic to hosting providers. The virtualization layer decouples a user's computing session from the underlying operating system and server instance, enabling high-availability service by transparently migrating sessions from one server to another during server maintenance or upgrades. We have implemented a prototype in Linux that works with existing unmodified applications and operating system kernels. Our experimental results demonstrate that MobiDesk has very low virtualization overhead, can provide a full featured desktop experience including full-motion video support, and is able to migrate users' sessions efficiently and reliably for high-availability, while maintaining existing network connections.