Research

General

My research focus is making system software components more robust in terms of security and reliability. This includes providing developers with the necessary tools to aid their work.

Application Reliability

In the ASTEROID project, we develop mechanisms to make applications more robust in the presence of hardware faults, such as transient single-event upsets. Our OS-level approach is to redundantly execute applications and compare their states whenever they externalize it. The whole thing works for arbitrary binary-only applications and requires no developer interaction.

Valgrind

Valgrind is a framework for dynamic binary instrumentation. We ported it to the Fiasco.OC microkernel and are now figuring out how to use it for analyzing operating system components, device drivers and virtual machines.

L4 Device Driver Envrionment (DDE)

While doing my Master's at TUD, I became involved in the DDE project, which aims at providing an operating system support library that enables us to reuse unmodified Linux and FreeBSD device drivers in our system. Especially, I was involved in the implementation of DDE for Linux 2.6 device drivers and in the port of the DDEKit to the L4Re runtime environment.

More documentation on DDE can be found in our Wiki.

Funding

As German universities are usually sponsored by either the European Commission, or a government agency, I contributed to the following projects:

• ASTEROID (2010-)
• Embedded MultiCores (2008-2010)
• European Multilaterally Secure Computing Base (2006-2008)
• Open Trusted Computing (2006)

Internships

In 2008 I spent three months interning at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. In the Systems and Networking group I worked under the supervision of Eno Thereska and contributed a small part to what became our SIGMETRICS 2010 publication.

In 2011, I interned in VMWare's VMKernel core group in Palo Alto, CA. Within the team I worked on providing data race detection for kernel code. This work was based on previous research done by some folks at MS Research.

Teaching

Besides running our local Systems Paper Reading Group, I'm also involved in some courses at TU Dresden's OS Group:

• Lecturer and TA in our course on Microkernel-based Operating Systems
• Lecturer our course on Influential Operating Systems Research
• TA for the Practical lab - Programming UNIX
• TA for the undergrad course on Operating Systems
• Used to take care of the Complex lab

Side Projects

Sometimes I enjoy hacking small tools to ease my life:

• For my own good, I have some tools extending the Simics simulator.
• Splinter is an output beautifier for SPLint.
• Tree2Dot transforms ANTLR3's stringified output of a parse tree into GraphViz format.