Nathan Rutherford

Nathan Rutherford

Vulnerability Researcher | PhD Researcher

Royal Holloway, Univeristy of London

Biography

I am a systems security researcher within the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. My research centres around hardware-software co-design for building security architectures and operating system designs for many-core, heterogenous systems. I also have wider research interests in areas related to usable security, and discussions surrounding security aspects of software development practices.

Previously I completed an MSci (Hons) in Computer Science at Lancaster University. During my time at Lancaster I worked as a research associate on a number of projects ranging from large-scale language processing pipelines to augmenting network monitoring systems using Software Defined Networking (SDN).Outside of research I enjoy indie game development, making noises on the guitar, and subservience to my feline overlords

Interests
  • Systems Security
  • Operating Systems
Education

  • PhD in Information Security, 2019

    Royal Holloway, University of London

  • MSci Computer Science, 2015

    Lancaster University

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Security Lab Intern
HP Labs
Apr 2021 – Nov 2021 Bristol
Explored the intersection of academic and industry research problems to investigate novel solutions in virtualization security
 
 
 
 
 
Research Associate
Networking Research Group | Lancaster University
Jun 2019 – Sep 2019 Lancaster
Research and development of proof-of-concept systems for augmenting network monitoring using P4 and other SDN technologies
 
 
 
 
 
Security Researcher (Placement)
Amiosec Ltd
Jan 2019 – Apr 2021 Tewkesbury
Performed a security compatibility assessment of P4, a new toolchain for programming network elements (e.g. switches). Based on this assessment, VHDL and P4 methods for developing FPGA-based packet processors were compared. The result from this was a technical report and in-house presentation delivered to Amiosec.
 
 
 
 
 
Undergraduate Research Associate
UCREL | Lancaster University
Jun 2018 – May 2019 Lancaster
Engineered a large-scale biomedical corpus query system and NLP pipeline (BioTM) using open-source software that processed over 10,000 open-access academic papers. This tool allowed biomedical researchers to apply common corpus linguistic methods to aid hypothesis generation for future research.
 
 
 
 
 
Research Intern
SCC & Psychology | Lancaster University
Jul 2017 – Jun 2019 Lancaster
Developed a proof-of-concept Android application that interfaced with an OpenBCI board for portable collection of EEG (electrical activity of the brain) data in psychology studies concerned with epilepsy monitoring. This app was demonstrated at the 2018 Digital Health Showcase at Lancaster University.

Recent Posts

Reflecting on My Time as a Security Research Intern at HP Labs, Bristol
As part of my PhD program in the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, I took part in a six month research internship. This post contains reflections on my time spent at HP Labs, and the positive impact that I feel it has had on my PhD research.
Nathan Rutherford
Last updated on May 7, 2022 4 min read misc
TrustOre: Side-Channel Resistant Storage for SGX using Intel Hybrid CPU-FPGA
This paper presents an architecture for extending the Intel SGX trust model to include an external FPGA device providing a trusted storage service.
Nathan Rutherford
Last updated on May 7, 2022 5 min read
PHMon: A Programmable Hardware Monitor and Its Security Use Cases
This paper presents PHMon, a Programmable Hardware Monitoring system for enforcing flexible security policies using a match-action (match-event) pipeline.
Nathan Rutherford
Last updated on May 7, 2022 4 min read
Prudent Practices for Designing Malware Experiments: Status Quo and Outlook
Rossow et al provide a critique of the scientific method when performing dynamic analysis of malware and propose a number of guidelines to address pitfalls. This post summarises these guidelines.
Nathan Rutherford
Last updated on May 7, 2022 3 min read

Recent Publications

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Nathan Rutherford (2021). Logibot: Investigating Engagement and Development of Computational Thinking Through Virtual Reality.

Nathan Rutherford (2021). Problematising Characteristicness: A Biomedical Association Case Study.

Nathan Rutherford (2020). Infrastructure for Semantic Annotation in the Genomics Domain.