Michael Kaminsky

Contact Information

Senior Research Scientist
Intel Labs Pittsburgh (ILP)

Adjunct Research Scientist
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University

4720 Forbes Ave., Suite 410
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Tel: (412) 297-4100
Fax: (412) 297-4110
Email: michael dot e dot kaminsky at intel dot com

Research

I am generally interested in computer science systems research. More specifically, I enjoy working on distributed systems, networking, operating systems and network/systems security. At ILP, I am working primary on a handful of projects: Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN), Neighborhood-Aware Networking (NaN), and CloudConnect. Previous projects include Reliable Email (Re:) and Data-Oriented Transfer (DOT). Most of my graduate work involved a secure, decentralized network filesystem called SFS.

My Ph.D. thesis involved two pieces of work. First, I worked on the problem of how to do user authentication in a global file system. See our SOSP paper for more details. Second, I worked on REX, a remote-execution extension to SFS which incorporates the flexible key management and security already available in the filesystem. This extension is integrated with the SFS agent architecture and the filesystem; we hope with REX+SFS to provide a complete distributed computing environment where moving between machines is transparent. See our USENIX paper for more details.

My Master's research dealt with the problem of how to achieve flexible server key management in secure systems. In SFS, we use the idea of an user-controlled agent program which offers a toolbox approach to key management; users can mix and match different techniques to customize the authentication process. See my Master's Thesis (below) for more details.

In summer 1998, I did some really interesting and fun work related to the Interactive Barney doll from Actimates—check out this page for more info.

Biography

In Summer 2004, I joined Intel Labs Pittsburgh (ILP) (formerly Intel Research Pittsburgh) after graduating from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where I worked with Frans Kaashoek in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems (PDOS) group. I received my S.M. (Masters) in EECS from MIT in Spring 2000. I received my B.S. in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley in Spring 1998.

Selected Publications