Trustworthy Systems

Quick links: Alumni Research Group Leader, Academic Staff, Engineers and Research Assistants, Research Students, Coursework Students, Student Interns and Visitors, Support, Affiliates

Research Group Leader

Gernot Heiser Gernot Heiser  Scientia Professor; John Lions Chair

Gernot's main research interests are in operating systems, especially microkernel-based systems, and their use in embedded/cyber-physical systems, OS security and robustness issues, general cyber-security, energy/power management, real-time systems, virtualization and architectural support for operating systems.

Academic Staff

Carroll Morgan Carroll Morgan  Professor

Carroll's research is on formal methods, semantics, security, program correctness and probability.

Craig McLaughlin Craig McLaughlin  Research Associate

Craig's research interests include type theory, logic, programming languages, compilers, and formal verification. He presently works on a formal security framework for a provably secure operating system

Johannes Åman Pohjola Johannes Åman Pohjola  Lecturer

Johannes is interested in beauty and truth. He works on interactive theorem proving, program verification and concurrency theory, specifically for the Pancake language

Kevin Elphinstone Kevin Elphinstone  Associate Professor

Kevin works on operating system microkernels and the infrastructure required to support larger systems upon them. His current focus includes secure embedded operating systems suitable for formal verification, and for being the basis of secure systems for embedded devices. He also has interests in componentised operating systems, operating systems in general, security, real-time systems, computer architecture as it pertains to operating systems, and virtualisation.

Scott Buckley Scott Buckley  Research Associate

Scott is a postdoctoral fellow, working on verifying time protection: modeling microarchitectural state behaviour and proving that seL4's time protection mechanisms prevent leaks through time-based microarchitectural side channels. Prior to this work Scott completed his PhD in programming languages and formal methods at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Engineers and Research Assistants

Ben Nott Ben Nott  Research Assistant

Ben has deep research interests in formal methods and metamathemtics. Ben is working on Pancake language semantics and program verification.

Courtney Darville Courtney Darville  Research Assistant

Courtney works on secure multi-server operating system design, and on applying model checking to verify inter-component communication in a highly modular seL4-based OS.

Eric Chan Eric Chan  OS Engineer

Eric is working on the sel4 Core Platform

Gordon Sau Gordon Sau  Research Assistant

Gordon is working on adding support for memory-mapped IO for Pancake.

Isitha Subasinghe Isitha Subasinghe  Research Assistant

Isitha's research interests include Operating Systems, Distributed Systems and Formal Verification. He presently works on verifying OS code using SMT solvers

Ivan Velickovic Ivan Velickovic  Research Assistant

Ivan is working on the seL4 Core Platform and device driver virtualisation on seL4.

James Archer James Archer  OS Engineer

James is working to improve the locking in multicore seL4.

Jingyao Zhou Jingyao Zhou  OS Engineer

Jingyao is interested in real-time operating systems and hardware. She presently works on device virtualisation for seL4

Krishnan Winter Krishnan Winter  OS Engineer

Krishnan is working on exercising the Pancake language for real device drivers

Mathieu Paturel Mathieu Paturel  Research Assistant

Mathieu is interested in formal methods, in particular bringing its cost down. He is presently working on verifying user level components running on top of the seL4 core platform, a very thin operating operating system.

Matthew Rossouw Matthew Rossouw  OS Engineer

Matt is working on User-space networking, sDDF, network benchmarking and performance

Miki Tanaka Miki Tanaka  Senior Proof Engineer

Miki is interested in formal verification techniques and their application to software systems, and broadly proof engineering as a discipline. Miki has contributed to the verification of architecture porting for seL4 and also the verification of the seL4 MCS extensions as the technical lead. Miki is currently involved in a project for device driver verification using the Pancake language (based on cakeML/HOL4).

Peter Chubb Peter Chubb  Senior Systems Consultant

Peter's research interests include operating system abstractions for, intra alia, storage, scheduling, memory management, and locking. He is also interested in capacity planning, and in systems performance measurement and optimisation. His main expertise is in Unix and Linux kernels, and low level system support built on these. He also maintains the Trustworthy Systems website and internal infrastructure.

Tiana Tsang Ung Tiana Tsang Ung  Research Assistant

Tiana is working on Pancake

Research Students

Kevin Tran Kevin Tran  PhD Student
Supervised by Johannes Åman Pohjola

Kevin's research is on creating a framework for reasoning about concurrent programs, with the ultimate goal of verifying multicore seL4.

Coursework Students

Alwin Joshy Alwin Joshy  Honours Thesis Student
Supervised by Gernot Heiser

Alwin is working on fast paths in seL4 and on a secure multi-server OS on seL4

Arthur Wang Arthur Wang  Honours Thesis Student
Supervised by Gernot Heiser

Arthur is working on IOMMU management on seL4.

Dan Shea Dan Shea  Honours Thesis Student
Supervised by Gernot Heiser

Dan is working on adding an IRQ fast path to seL4.

Jasper Di Francesco Jasper Di Francesco  Honours Thesis Student
Supervised by Gernot Heiser

Jasper is building a native web server for the seL4 core platform. His honours thesis is on performance limits for protected-mode real-time OSes.

Lucy Parker Lucy Parker  Honours Thesis Student
Supervised by Gernot Heiser

Lucy is working on the Device Driver Framework, to optimise device drivers running on seL4.

Patrick Hao Patrick Hao  Honours Thesis Student
Supervised by Gernot Heiser

Patrick is working on applying seL4 to the automotive space.

Thomas Bove Thomas Bove  Honours Thesis Student
Supervised by Gernot Heiser

Tom is working on hardware implementations of time protection.

Student Interns and Visitors

Charran Kethees  Student Intern
Supervised by Johannes Åman Pohjola

Charran is working on the development and verification of Hoare Logic for the interaction trees.

Ryan Shi Ryan Shi  Student Intern
Supervised by Peter Chubb

Ryan is assisting in developing a native file system on the seL4 core platform.

In one line, Ryan wants to research more in the intersection of maths and CS. Ryan currently is pursuing a Pure Maths major and is exploring the areas of: - Functional Analysis - Topological Spaces - Time Series - Measure Theory

In the realm of CS, Ryan has a shallow background in Networking and Data Analysis. Ryan would like to learn more about the following areas: - Haskell / OCaml - Rust - C

Thomas Qu  Student Intern
Supervised by Johannes Åman Pohjola

Thomas Qu is interested in type theory and software verification.

Waleed Shahid Waleed Shahid  Student Intern
Supervised by Gernot Heiser

Waleed is analyzing and optimizing seL4's worst case cold-cache performance.

Support

Birgit Brecknell Birgit Brecknell  Project Manager

Birgit works part time with the TS group as project manager for strategic and external projects

Christopher Irving Christopher Irving  Administrator

Christopher is training as a system administrator to maintain the machines and infrastructure of Trustworthy Systems.

Tessa Lunney Tessa Lunney  Administrator; Administrative Assistant

Tessa works part-time as the Administrative Assistant, managing the office. She works Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Affiliates

Gerwin Klein Gerwin Klein  Adjunct Professor; Founder and Chief Scientist at Proofcraft

Gerwin's research interest is in Formal Methods, more specifically in interactive theorem proving, software verification, semantics of programming languages, and in the emerging field of proof engineering. Generally, he wants software systems to be dependable, and thinks that formal specification and proof can make a significant contribution towards that goal.

Ihor Kuz Ihor Kuz  Adjunct Associate Professor; Engineer at Kry10

Ihor worked at TS from 2003 until 2021. During that time he led the systems team and many of the projects TS was involved with. He now works as an Engineer at Kry10.

Ihor's research interests include operating systems and distributed systems. In particular the design of flexible and modular operating systems, security and safety properties of such systems, distributed system middleware, and management of distributed resources.

June Andronick June Andronick  Adjunct Professor; Founder and CEO at Proofcraft

June had joined the Trustworthy Systems research group in 2008 (in NICTA), and led the group from end of 2016 to end of 2020. Her main research interest is in formal verification and certification of software systems, more precisely in formal proof of correctness and security properties of programs using interactive theorem proving, as well as concurrency reasoning, targeting interruptible and multicore systems.

Rafal Kolanski Rafal Kolanski  Adjunct Lecturer; Founder at Proofcraft

Rafal worked as a proof engineer at Trustworthy Systems until April 2021. He led the Proof Engineering team from 2016 until 2021.

Rafal is interested in the formal verification of high assurance, system-level software, both from the perspective of verification in practice, but also proof maintenance and increasing the proof coverage of already verified systems.

Robert Sison Robert Sison  Visiting Fellow; Research Fellow, University of Melbourne

Robert is broadly interested in discovering how best to design and construct software systems with formally proved functional-correctness and security properties at scale. Their current research concerns the formal verification of operating systems to enforce increasingly useful forms of information-flow security, also known as confidentiality.