Supervisor: Professors Bill Roscoe and Sadie Creese
Start Date: October 2013 End Date: April 2017
The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham has agreed to sponsor a Doctoral Studentship at Oxford Universityâs Department of Computer Science working on ‘non-interference Assurance Methods for Cloud Environments’ commencing in October 2013 or soon afterwards.
Due to funding restrictions the studentship is only open to UK nationals and the successful candidate will be required to spend in the region of 2 – 4 weeks per year at GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham. To be considered for this studentship, candidates must therefore be prepared to undergo GCHQ’s security clearance procedures.
Project Details
Users of the Cloud commit their data and processing to provider’s architectures but nevertheless expect to preserve the security and integrity of their material. They have to trust the cloud provider to store data reliably, perform the operations required on it, and not to allow other parties to gain access to this data or corrupt it.
The unique challenge of achieving this in the Cloud is that hardware is shared between tasks submitted by different users. In particular it is possible that a malevolent party can submit jobs to the cloud with the intention of discovering information about another’s data or the operations performed on it, or somehow corrupt or disrupt these.
The topic of this project is to use the theory of noninterference to analyse cloud architectures for the possibility that they might make such things possible. Noninterference allows us to examine a system with more than one user, and to discover whether it is possible for one user to affect what others see.
You will examine how formulations of noninterference in CSP, supported by the FDR tool, can be applied to the cloud. You can read about this theory in chapter 12 of “Theory and Practice of Concurrency”, by Bill Roscoe, with the rest of the book describing CSP and FDR.
Candidates for this studentship must have the ability to learn to apply this theory to abstractions of architectures.
Applicants must also satisfy the usual requirements for studying for a doctorate at Oxford: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/admissions/dphil/dphil-criteria.pdf
A new version of FDR, with greatly enhanced capabilities, is under development at Oxford, will be available for this project.
Funding Details
The studentship will be funded for a period of 3.5 years. GCHQ will cover the costs of university and college fees (currently £6559 per annum) and will provide an annual stipend to the student corresponding to the National Minimum Stipend (currently £13,726 per annum). There will also be provision for a laptop and for travel to meetings and conferences.
If you have any questions and to apply please email  Julie.sheppard@cs.ox.ac.uk by clicking the APPLY button below, in the first instance.
When applying for this studentship, please quote the following studentship code:
CS-AWR-JOBS (if you have seen this on jobs.ac.uk)
CS-AWR-FIND (if you have seen this on findaphd.com)
CS-AW-WEB (if you have seen this on departmental web pages)
The closing date for applications is 28th August, 2013.