Prof. Nickolai Zeldovich

Professor Zeldovich is interested in building secure systems, from programming languages, to operating systems, to hardware architecture. Some current projects involve re-designing the security model of web browsers to improve security and enable more flexible mash-up applications; providing tools to help programmers check application-level "semantic" security invariants; coming up with techniques to make web application databases scale; and improving application performance on multicore systems.

At Stanford, Zeldovich's research focused on HiStar, an operating system designed to minimize the amount of trusted code. Previously, he worked on the Collective, a virtual machine-based computing infrastructure providing security, ease of management, and mobility. This project transformed into a startup company called Moka5.


As an undergraduate and Master's student at MIT's PDOS research group, Zeldovich worked on the Click router, and on multi-processor execution of event-driven programs.