Bhushan Jain Wins 2014 IBM PhD Fellowship

 

Stony Brook, NY- June, 2014

The highly competitive IBM Ph.D. 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 a fellowship award.

Jain, a third year PhD candidate, works with his advisor, 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.  Jain's recent Protego identifies practical techniques to remove privilege from a wide array of binaries on modern Linux systems.  Jain 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. Bhushan has a strong publication and patent record for someone early in his career”, says Dr. Porter. 

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. At IBM he is working with Dr. Dimitrios Pendarakis to remove hypervisor and guest OS from the TCB of an application. He has also worked at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and has served as a Research and Teaching Assistant at Stony Brook.

Upon the award, Jain said, “With less than 10% of worldwide applicants making it to the selection phase, I am thrilled to be recognized with an IBM fellowship. My continued relationship with the IBM security team is a great opportunity and will aid in my research. ”

About the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University
Jain joins  three other students from the department who have also received this honor. Established in 1969, the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University is consistently ranked among the top computer science departments in the nation by the National Research Council.  The department is the largest unit in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University. With annual research expenditures of roughly $8 million, the department is active in many of the major research areas of computer science with specialization in algorithms, computer science education, computer systems, concurrency and verification, intelligent systems, networking, security, and visual computing.