| Zhang, Xu (張旭) | |
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Ph.D. Student Chicago, IL 60607 Email: echo "eHpoYW5nQGNzLnVpYy5lZHUK" | base64 -d
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About me
I am a Ph.D. student at Ethos lab of Computer Science Deparment of University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Broadly speaking, my research interest is in operating systems and security. My advisor is Professor Jon A. Solworth, who is the founding director of Center for Research and Instruction in Technologies for Electronic Security (RITES). Right now I am working on Ethos--an operating system which creates a culture of security.
Before attending UIC, I received my undergraduate degree at Wuhan University (
), which enjoys great history and tradition.
Education
- Ph.D. student in Computer Science, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, 2009 - present
- B.S. in Software Engineering, Wuhan University, China, 2005 - 2009
Research
Ethos
My Ph.D. research involves Ethos, an clean-slate operating system designed to be secure.
Ethos is
intended to make it far easier to write applications which are robust against attack. It is a mammoth undertaking. It involves architecture, software layering, OS design and implementation, and programming language porting. We’re rethinking many aspects of OS design, and this increases project complexity.
Ethos is building on top of Xen hypervisor. We really benefit from the thrive of VMMs.
Here is an ascii graph that shows the architecture which Ethos adopts:
----------------------------- | Ethos <--|--> Linux | ---------------------------- | XEN | -----------------------------
Because
we do not want to deal with writing device drivers, file systems and networking at this early stage of Ethos. We still want a basic kernel that supports processes and a system call interface. This will suffice to evaluate the new secure system calls we'd be trying out.
Please refer to the following links for more details.
My future research concerns structuring Ethos to increase system load-bearing, and as a result, to provide scalable secure network services.
More concretely, Ethos is event-based and presents an (event-based) asynchronous system call interface. It avoids pre-emptive threading, preventing memory races which are difficult to debug as they can occur anywhere in the code.
I propose to design a "hybrid" architecture, which combines sweet spots of threads and events. For instance, to avoid the complexity of "stack ripping" that bogged down event-based programming, to reduce memory footprint and use less context switches with events, and to eliminate the need for locks with non-preemptive scheduling. I plan to design and implement a high-performance event- based architecture for multiprocessor architectures, and hope to increase inter-process communication (IPC) and kernel performance, increase memory locality, reduce cache flushes, and remove protection boundary crossings while providing simple semantics.
Publicationss
- MinimaLT: Minimal-latency Networking Through Better Security. W. Michael Petullo, Xu Zhang, Jon A. Solworth, Daniel W. Bernstein, and Tanja Lange. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'13), 11/2013. PDF
- MinimaLT: Minimal Latency Networking Through Better Security. Xu Zhang, W. Michael Petullo, Jon A. Solworth, Daniel W. Bernstein, and Tanja Lange. Poster at 2nd Greater Chicago Area System Research Workshop (GCASR), 05/2013. Poster
Projects
Ethos
Ethos kernel development, debugging, and refactoring in low level kernel semantics, porting improvements, and etc.
- Finished porting Ethos to Xen PV x86 64bit
- Ethos kernel stability (networking, interrupts, processes, FPU, memory protection)
- Document object model (with awareness of collaboration) of Ethos Mark-up language
Talks
- Questions you always wanted to know about operating system kernel but were too smart to ask. Advanced Programming Seminar at UIC Department of Computer Science, 10/2013. Recording
- Git. Advanced Programming Seminar at UIC Department of Computer Science, 03/2012. Recording
I am the coordinator of Advanced Programming Seminar 2012~2013. Check our website for more interesting talks.
Teaching
- CS 486: Secure Operating System Design and Implementation, Spring 2015:
- CS 109: C/C++ Programming for Engineers with MatLab, 2009-2010:
Address
Rm 4224, Science and Engineering Labs, 840 W Taylor St, Chicago, IL 60607echo "eHpoYW5nQGNzLnVpYy5lZHUK" | base64 -d
Social networks
