A picture of me.

Dan O'Keeffe

I am a Senior Lecturer (i.e. Associate Professor) in the Centre for Programming Languages and Systems (CPLS) and the Systems and Software Security Lab (S3Lab) at the Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL). My research interests lie broadly in the areas of distributed systems, security, databases, and networking, with a current focus on cloud computing security.

Prior to joining RHUL I was a post-doctoral researcher in the Large-Scale Distributed Systems (LSDS) group at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London. I completed my PhD under Prof. Jean Bacon as a member of the OPERA group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. Between my PhD and post-doc I also spent several years as a software engineer in the financial services industry building high-frequency trading platforms.

The best way to get in touch with me is via email at Daniel dot OKeeffe at rhul dot ac dot uk.

Research

In ongoing work, I am exploring performance and security trade-offs in proof-of-stake blockchains as part of the Revoke project. Previously, as part of the SeReCa, SecureCloud and CloudSafetyNet projects I have investigated techniques for improving user control and visibility over sensitive data in cloud platforms.

In addition to systems security, I have a strong interest in Big Data management, particularly stream processing systems. My recent research activities in this area centered on the ITA-DSM project, which transplanted popular "Big Data" stream processing platforms to edge computing environments.

Current Projects

Revoke

How can we adapt consensus protocols to mitigate the risk of ransomware attacks on proof-of-stake validators?

Past Projects

SecureCloud

Aims to remove technical impediments to dependable cloud computing for critical infrastructure applications such as smart grids and health care.

ITA-DSM

Explores data stream processing in non-traditional environments like mesh and mobile ad-hoc networks.

SeReCa

Exploited secure hardware extensions in modern commodity CPUs (e.g. Intel SGX) to protect cloud services and applications from malicious cloud providers.

CloudSafetyNet

Investigated how to monitor information flow in cloud systems to reduce the likelihood of unwanted data disclosure.

Recent Publications

  • Hack the Heap - Heap Layout Manipulation made easy, J. Gennissen, D. O'Keeffe WOOT 2022.

  • Spons & Shields: Practical Isolation for Trusted Execution, V.A. Sartakov, D. O'Keeffe, D. Eyers, L. Villanova, and P. Pietzuch, VEE 2021.

  • PAIGE: Towards a Hybrid-Edge Design for Privacy-Preserving Intelligent Personal Assistants, Y.Liang, D. O'Keeffe, and N. Sastry, EdgeSys 2020.

  • Facilitating plausible deniability for cloud providers regarding tenants activities using trusted execution, D. O'Keeffe, A. Vranaki, D. Eyers, and T. Pasquier, IC2E 2020 (short paper).

  • Frontier: Resilient Edge Processing for the Internet of Things, D. O'Keeffe, T. Salonidis, and P. Pietzuch, VLDB 2018.

  • LibSEAL: Revealing Service Integrity Violations Using Trusted Execution, P-L. Aublin, F. Kelbert, D. O'Keeffe, D. Muthukumaran, C. Priebe, J. Lind, R. Krahn, C. Fetzer, D. Eyers and P. Pietzuch, EuroSys 2018.

  • Glamdring: Automatic Application Partitioning for Intel SGX, J.Lind, C. Priebe, D. Muthukumuran, D. O'Keeffe, P-L. Aublin, F. Kelbert, T. Reiher, D. Goltzche, D. Eyers, R. Kapitza, C. Fetzer and P. Pietzuch, USENIX ATC 2017.

  • SCONE: Secure Linux Containers with Intel SGX, S.Arnautov, B. Trach, F. Gregor, T. Knauth, A. Martin, C. Priebe, J.Lind, D. Muthukumuran, D. O'Keeffe, M. Stillwell, D. Goltzche, D. Eyers, R. Kapitza, P. Pietzuch, and C. Fetzer, USENIX OSDI 2016.

  • FlowWatcher: Defending against Data Disclosure Vulnerabilities in Web Applications, D. Muthukumuran, D. O'Keeffe, C. Priebe, D. Eyers, B. Shand, and P. Pietzuch, ACM CCS 2015.

  • Network-Aware Stream Query Processing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, D. O'Keeffe, T. Salonidis and P. Pietzuch, IEEE MILCOM 2015.

  • CloudSafetyNet: Detecting data leakage between Cloud tenants, C. Priebe, D. Muthukumuran, D. O'Keeffe, D. Eyers, B. Shand, R. Kapitza, and P. Pietzuch, ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW), 2014.

  • Adaptive Stream Query Planning for Hybrid Coalition Networks, D. O'Keeffe, T. Salonidis, and P. Pietzuch, 8th Annual Conference of the ITA (ACITA), 2014.

  • Adaptive Stream Processing for Hybrid Coalition Networks: Challenges and Initial Solutions, J. Kurose, D. O'Keeffe, P. Pietzuch, T. Salonidis, A. Seetharam, and D. Towsley, 7th Annual Conference of the ITA (ACITA), 2013.