In a dark and dystopian future, the Netflix show (and even better book series) Altered Carbon imagines a humanity that can "digitize" our brains and place them into artificial bodies, allowing the richest in society to live forever. Although the story is fiction, it illustrates real-life information security issues extremely well, particularly those related to virtualization, which I'll explore in this article.
Spoiler alert! This article reviews events from the show. I recommend waiting until you've watched Season 2 before continuing.
In the world of Altered Carbon, society has figured out how to make a device called a "cortical stack," which is implanted into babies when they turn 1. Their consciousness is then digitized into what's called "digital human freight" (DHF) and placed into this stack. This allows humanity to "re-sleeve" the DHF into a different stack and body — essentially getting immortality through virtualization. "Real death" occurs when the stack containing the last copy of a DHF is physically destroyed. Since humans can make copies of their DHF (if they're rich enough), they could have multiple copies of themselves existing at once; though placing copies in two bodies simultaneously ("double-sleeving") is highly illegal in the Altered Carbon universe.
In real-life computing, the operating system (OS) is the core brain of our computers. With virtualization, we can abstract that software brain from the hardware it runs on. Like DHF, virtualization allows us to run the same OS on many different platforms, regardless of the platform's underlying hardware and/or software. We can make many copies of our favorite OS configuration and use that as a starting point for all new systems (the go ..
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