Some notes for PhD applicants

Markus Kuhn

I am supervising at present four research students, the first of which expects to get his PhD later this summer. For the coming years, I expect to take on 0–2 new research students every year.

Topics: Here are some areas of research that I am particularly interested in at the moment, where I see potential for nice PhD topics, and where I feel confident to supervise students:

• Hardware and signal-processing aspects of computer security ("What exciting things remain to be discovered in between communications engineering, information theory and cryptography?")
• Compromising emanations ("What unorthodox ways are there to bypass software security mechanisms?")
• Secure access control and replication mechanisms for shared data repositories that do not belong to a single individual or organization ("What do we need to implement Sourceforge and Wikipedia as decentralised as USENET?")
• Design of a modular, trusted, next-generation display protocol ("What comes after VT100, X11 and RDesktop?")
• Next generation meta file formats and file systems ("What comes after XML?")
• Next-generation font and document representations

Funding: All my current research students are self-funded. They have managed to win a scholarship before they came to Cambridge.

Selection: So far, I have been able to chose from almost a dozen candidates each year.

For more information, please read:

• the Computer Lab's pages for PhD applicants
• the University's graduate admissions pages
• cost of a full-time PhD course

created 2005-03-02 – last modified 2005-01-04 – http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/