The IBM PhD Fellowship Awards Program, which honors exceptional PhD students around the world, has selected Bhushan Jain from the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University to receive one of its highly competitive awards. A third-year PhD candidate, Jain works with Professor Donald Porter in the Operating System, Security, Concurrency and Architecture Research (OSCAR) Lab. Jain’s areas of interest are virtualization security, memory isolation, system security, trusted hardware, cloud security and storage.
IBM recognized Jain for his interest in solving problems important to IBM and fundamental to innovation. As today’s computer systems become increasingly complex and layered, system security hinges on increasingly complex trust relationships among software components. Jain’s research identifies techniques to reduce this proliferation of trust and resulting security vulnerabilities without sacrificing functionality. His recent Protego identifies practical techniques to remove privilege from a wide array of binaries on modern Linux systems. He is currently investigating techniques to reduce trust among a hypervisor, guest OS, and application.
“I nominated Jain for this award because of his innovative spirit and ability to solve complex security problems,” said Professor Porter. “Bhushan has a strong publication and patent record for someone early in his career.”
In addition to the stipend, tuition and fees, in January 2014 Jain joined IBM’s System Security Group at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center as a research intern. Jain is working with a DHS-funded research team to develop an innovative secure processor architecture and its software stack, which protects the confidentiality and integrity of verifiably secure applications. The architecture minimizes the amount of code that needs to be trusted so that an application can use OS and Hypervisor services but not trust their millions of lines of code with sensitive information. The only code the application needs to trust is the code within the application. He has also worked at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and has served as a research and teaching assistant at Stony Brook.
“With less than 10 percent of worldwide applicants making it to the selection phase, I am thrilled to be recognized with an IBM fellowship,” said Jain. “My continued relationship with the IBM security team is a great opportunity and will aid in my research. ”
Jain joins three other students from the department who have received this honor in past years.
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