Trustworthy Computing in Geo-Distributed Cloud Platforms

Clouds are rapidly becoming a platform of choice for hosting increasingly complex application software and services. Among the attractive features they offer are elasticity and pay-as-you-go model, which allow businesses to gain access to vast computing resources with minimum upfront investment, and operational costs. Although a great deal of progress has so far been made with respect to the low-level technological underpinning of the clouds, today’s clouds are still considered to be insufficiently trustworthy to serve as a computing platform for critical infrastructure (such as e.g., financial or power grid) operators and public administration sectors.

The objective of this project is to develop foundational building blocks and tools for supporting trustworthy cloud services, and gain insights into their fundamental capabilities and limitations.

The successful recipient will have an opportunity to conduct research into a wide range of topics within the general area of cloud trustworthiness broadly construed to include (but not to be limited to) the following:
• Reliable data storage resistant to failures ranging from individual server outages to malicious attacks.
• Data retrievability in geo-distributed multi-cloud environments, and preventing provider lock-in.
• Resilient high-level storage services (such as key-value and NoSQL stores) capable of supporting a range of well-defined consistency guarantees in large-scale, and possibly geo-distributed cloud settings.
• Trusted and secure virtualized cloud middleware for hosting user application and services.
• Verification and testing of the cloud services.

Good grasp of distributed systems and their fundamentals are highly desirable. Familiarity with security, testing, verification, and basic understanding of cloud computing are desirable but not essential. Interest in implementing system prototypes and their performance evaluation is expected though exceptional theory-inclined candidates are welcome to apply.

The successful recipient will be advised by Dr. Gregory Chockler, and depending on the focus area, will have an opportunity to collaborate with researchers from Swedish Institute for Computer Science (SICS), INESC/ID (Portugal), or King’s College London.