Nathan S Rutherford

Nathan S Rutherford

PhD Researcher in Information Security

CDT in Cyber Security - Royal Holloway, University of London

Biography

I am a PhD researcher within the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. My current research centres around systems security, particularly leveraging hardware capabilities for building depending many-core operating systems, which I am conducting as a member of the S3Lab. I also have wider research interests in areas related to usable security, and discussions surrounding security aspects of software development practices.

Prior to starting my PhD, 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).

Interests

  • Systems Security
  • Operating Systems
  • Usable Security

Education

  • PhD in Information Security, Present

    Royal Holloway, University of London

  • MSci in Computer Science, 2019

    Lancaster University

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Research Associate

Networking Research Group | Lancaster University

Jun 2019 – Sep 2019 Lancaster, UK
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 2019 Lancaster/Tewkesbury, UK
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, UK
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 2018 Lancaster, UK
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

Using Javascript to Bypass Scalpers

I share a tale of using JavaScript to secure a flightstick during a Scalper infested restock
Feb 27, 2021 4 min read just-for-fun

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.
Last updated on Feb 22, 2021 5 min read Paper Review

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.
Nov 19, 2020 4 min read Paper Review

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.
Oct 31, 2019 3 min read Paper Review

Projects

Academic Video Creation Workshop

This workshop aims to be a helpful resource for students and academics showing how to record and edit video for a talk.

Recent & Upcoming Talks

HP Day 2020

In this session, I present a poster outlining early work on leveraging hardware capabilities for building dependable many-core operating systems
Dec 14, 2020 3:00 PM — Dec 15, 2020 6:00 PM Royal Holloway, University of London | Virtual Event
PDF Slides Video

Super-infrastructure for Biomedical Text Mining

We present and demo a super-NLP-infrastructure for biomedical text-mining aimed at an audience of NLP practitioners.
May 30, 2019 3:00 PM Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Super-infrastructure for Biomedical Text Mining

Profiling Medical Journal Articles Using a Gene Ontology Semantic Tagger

As part of the HG2BTM workshop we presented an overview of the work carried out as part of the BioTM project.
Jan 8, 2019 10:00 AM Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Profiling Medical Journal Articles Using a Gene Ontology Semantic Tagger

Recent Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.

Infrastructure for Semantic Annotation in the Genomics Domain

We describe a novel super-infrastructure for biomedical text mining which incorporates an end-to-end pipeline for the collection, …
Mahmoud El-Haj, Nathan S Rutherford, Matthew Coole, Ignatius Ezeani, Sheryl Prentice, Nancy Ide, Jo Knight, Scott Piao, John Mariani, Paul Rayson, Keith Suderman
PDF

Achievements

Awards and Certifications

Gitlab 101

GitLab Oct 2020
Fundamentals of using Gitlab - terminology, issues, and merge requests
See certificate

Best Technical Solution

Orbit May 2020
Responsible Research Innovation (RRI) Workshop on solutions to maritime security
See certificate

Contact