Derek Murray

I am a third year PhD student in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. I am a member of the Networks and Operating Systems group, which is a subdivision of the Systems Research Group.

Research

Under the supervision of Steve Hand, I am carrying out research into large-scale distributed computation. In particular, I am looking at techniques and algorithms that improve performance on heterogeneous systems, such as cloud computing platforms. For more information, see the project page.

I previously worked on the XenSE and OpenTC projects. My role in both of these projects was concerned with improving the security characteristics of the Xen virtual machine monitor.

My particular focus was on domain-zero (dom0) disaggregation. At present, a Xen system is managed by dom0, a full instance of Linux, including various user-space tools, which has full access to every virtual machine on a physical host. Therefore, the whole of dom0 has to be trusted, in order to trust the platform. Alternatively, if an attacker gains root privileges in dom0, he may compromise the whole system. In my work, I looked at splitting the functionality of dom0 into two or more domains, each of which is given the least privilege necessary to carry out its respective role.

Publications

Conferences

I have been fortunate to attend many conferences in recent years. My collected notes on some of them are available here:

Education

Before coming to Cambridge, I was awarded an MSc in High-Performance Computing by the University of Edinburgh. For my undergraduate studies, I recieved a BSc (Hons) in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow.

Teaching

In session 2007/2008, I supervised the following courses:

In session 2006/2007, I supervised the following Part II courses:

If I am supervising you, you might be looking for my information for supervisees.

Contact Details

I work in office FN07, on the first floor of the William Gates Building. My email address is Forename.Surname@cl.cam.ac.uk. My office telephone number is +44 (0)1223 763741, and I can usually be reached between 9am and 5pm on weekdays.