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Ashvin Goel

Professor

ECE and CS
University of Toronto

Research Interests

I am a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments at the University of Toronto. My research spans various areas in operating systems and focuses on reliability and security. As software systems have grown in size and complexity, they have become increasingly prone to failures and attacks. I am interested in building systems that allow detecting these problems and recovering from them. Some of my current research projects are listed below. If you are a prospective student, please visit the students page also.

End-to-End Data Reliability

The goal of this project is to ensure data integrity in the face of software bugs. Currently, the project is focused on improving the reliability of file-system software. When file systems are buggy, they can cause data corruption and persistent application crashes. We have developed a system called Recon that ensures that a file-system disk image will remain consistent in the face of arbitrary file-system bugs. The key idea is to verify all file-system operations that update the disk at runtime using a well-defined set of file-system consistency properties, and ensure that the file system's transaction mechanism is working correctly. We are also working on easing the development of our runtime verification method. This is joint work with Prof. Angela Demke Brown.

Operating System Instrumentation

A binary instrumentation system enables monitoring and manipulating every instruction in an executing binary. Binary instrumentation systems have been used for developing bug-finding and security tools. For example, Memcheck uses binary instrumentation to detect various types of memory errors dynamically, such as accessing memory after it has been freed. We have developed a binary instrumentation system for the Linux operating system (here is our initial design). We aim to use this system to develop tools to find memory bugs in the Linux kernel and to harden the kernel against buggy device drivers. This is joint work with Prof. Angela Demke Brown.

Data Protection and Recovery

The goal of this project is to simplify analysis and recovery from intrusions. When systems are compromised, they provide limited support for accurately analyzing the activities that occurred in the past, and thus intrusion analysis and recovery is a time-taking and error-prone operation. We have constructed an intrusion analysis system called Forensix that allows system administrators and security experts to quickly and easily track down sources of security incidents after they have happened. We have used Forensix to design a data recovery system called Taser that helps automatically revert the effects of intrusion activity, without affecting data that is unrelated to intrusions. We have also designed an application-level virtualization environment called Solitude for running untrusted network applications. Solitude protects critical data by limiting the propagation of attacks, thus complementing the Taser recovery system. We have applied these techniques for recovering data in web applications and for securing web browsers.

Previous Research Projects

Selected Publications

Professional Activities

I am currently serving on the following program committees:

  • Middleware, 2015.
  • HotStorage, 2015.
  • ICAC, 2015.
  • ICDCS, 2015.

I have served in the following program committees in the past:

  • ERC member for ASPLOS, 2015, 2014.
  • Middleware, 2014.
  • ACM SoCC, 2014.
  • DSN, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010.
  • FAST, 2015, 2013.
  • Eurosys, 2012, 2010.
  • ICDCS, 2014, 2012, 2011 (vice chair, OS track), 2006.
  • Hotdep, 2009, 2007.
  • EuroSec, 2009, 2008.
  • Submission editor for Operating Systems Review (OSR), 2007-2013.