Flux Research Group / School of Computing
University of Utah campus in fall

about us

The Flux Research Group conducts research in operating systems, networking, security, and virtualization.

Our group consists of three faculty and over two dozen research staff, graduate students, and undergrads. We are part of the School of Computing at the University of Utah.

recent news

Eric Eide, John Reger, and co-auhors win Most Influential PLDI Paper Award

Flux-built city-scale wireless testbed available as part of the NSF PAWR program

Flux students win best demo and poster at MobiCom

Kobus Van der Merwe wins NSDI “Test of Time” award

highlighted projects (see more)

CloudLab CloudLab

Many of the ideas that drive modern cloud computing, such as server virtualization, network slicing, and robust distributed storage, arose from the research community. Despite this success, today’s clouds have become environments that are unsuitable for moving this research agenda forward—they have particular, unmalleable implementations of these ideas “baked in.” CloudLab will not be a cloud; it will be large-scale, distributed scientific infrastructure on top of which many different clouds can be built.

A3 A3

The A3 project applies virtualization, record-and-replay, introspection, repair, and other techniques to develop a customizable container for “advanced adaptive applications.” The A3 container provides its protected application with both innate and adaptive defenses against security threats.

TCloud TCloud

In the TCloud project we are developing a self-defending, self-evolving, and self-accounting trustworthy cloud platform. Our approach in realizing TCloud holds to the following five tenets: defense in depth, least authority, explicit orchestration of security function, moving-target defense, and verifiable accountability.

XCap XCap

We are creating XCap, a secure environment for least-authority execution of applications and system services. Unmodified, untrusted, off-the-shelf applications, running on untrusted operating systems, are isolated by a virtual machine manager. XCap brings the power of a capability-based security system to Xen, building on two principles: strong isolation and secure collaboration.

Emulab Emulab

Emulab is a network testbed, giving researchers a wide range of environments in which to develop, debug, and evaluate their systems. The Emulab facility at the University of Utah has over 600 PCs, a hundred wireless devices, and dozens of switches. It is used by thousands of researchers at hundreds of institutions worldwide. The software that we built to run Emulab is open source, and is used as part of dozens of network testbeds across the globe.

research areas

group seminar

CSL Seminar - Fridays at 2 PM in 3485 MEB

recent publications (see more)

An NSF REU Site Based on Trust and Reproducibility of Intelligent Computation: Experience Report
Mary Hall, Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, Eric Eide, Johanna Cohoon, Jeff M. Phillips, Mu Zhang, Shireen Y. Elhabian, Aditya Bhaskara, Harvey Dam, Artem Yadrov, Tushar Kataria, Amir Mohammad Tavakkoli, Sameeran Joshi, and Mokshagna Sai Teja Karanam
In SC-W 2023 [ bibtex ]
OZTrust: An O-RAN Zero-Trust Security System
Hao (Harry) Jiang, Hyunseok Chang, Sarit Mukherjee, and Jacobus (Kobus) Van der Merwe
In IEEE NFV-SDN 2023 [ pdf :: bibtex ]