Bryan Ford
Location: (New Haven, CT)
Personal Research Web Page: http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/
Keywords: Operating systems, networking, distributed systems, peer-to-peer, cloud computing, security, privacy, anonymity, transport, routing, determinism, parallel processing, multicore systems
Posted on: Thursday, May 20th, 2010
Broad Research Area: Information Assurance / Security / Privacy / Cryptography, Mobile / Ubiquitous / Embedded Computing, Networks / Operating Systems
Research Interests:
My research interests cover a broad range of systems topics, centering on distributed operating systems but extending into networking, programming languages, and formal systems. The common motivating theme throughout my research is to discover ways to build computing systems that “just work” in the widest possible variety of practical scenarios: to rethink and generalize traditional algorithms, system structures, and protocols so as to eliminate technical restrictions that frequently limit the utility, applicability, or scalability of these systems. Current projects include:
1. Tng: a next-generation transport protocol architecture, which decomposes traditional transport layer functions such as endpoint naming, congestion control, and application-visible semantics to improve communication flexibility, performance, and security while remaining backward-compatible with the current Internet.
2. Determinator: an experimental multiprocessor, distributed operating system that creates an environment in which anything an application computes is exactly repeatable – even if the application consists of many cooperating processes running different executables in parallel, such as a parallel make. Atop a minimal microkernel that enforces this determinism guarantee, a user-space runtime uses distributed systems techniques to emulate familiar shared-state abstractions such as Unix processes, global file systems, and shared memory multithreading.
3. Dissent: a new anonymous peer-to-peer messaging protocol for small, decentralized online groups, which offers not only provable anonymity and integrity but also provable resistance to anonymous denial-of-service attacks (e.g., anonymous spam, “jamming”, or other disruption).
Contact Information:
Please E-mail me at bryan.ford@yale.edu.
