Rate My Professor Kevin Walsh

Kevin Walsh is an Associate Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at the College of the Holy Cross, where he joined the faculty following his Ph.D. and received tenure in 2018. He is currently on leave until Fall 2026. Walsh earned a B.S. in Computer Science magna cum laude from Cornell University in May 1998, an M.S. in Computer Science in August 2007, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in January 2012. His doctoral thesis, "Authorization and Trust in Software Systems," was supervised by Fred B. Schneider (chair), Andrew Myers, and David Henderson. His graduate studies were supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and an Intel Foundation Fellowship. Before returning to Cornell for graduate work, Walsh taught mathematics at Lycée Cabral in Fria, Republic of Guinea as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1998 to 2000 and lived and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Walsh's research interests encompass computer security, operating systems, and networks. Key projects include CloudProxy/Tao for authentication and authorization in cloud computing, Nexus Authorization Logic (NAL) for trustworthy computing, Credence for combating content pollution in peer-to-peer filesharing, ModelNet for large-scale network emulation, and SNS for improving wireless network simulation scale. Select publications are "Experience with an Object Reputation System for Peer-to-Peer Filesharing" (NSDI 2006, Best Paper Award), "Logical Attestation: An Authorization Architecture for Trustworthy Computing" (SOSP 2011), "Nexus Authorization Logic (NAL): Design Rationale and Applications" (TISSEC 2011), "Intra-Cloud and Inter-Cloud Authentication" (IEEE Cloud Computing 2017), "Mechanisms for Mutual Attested Microservice Communication" (Clouds and Applications Management Workshop 2017), and "TLS with Trustworthy Certificate Authorities" (IEEE CNS Workshop 2016). He has taught courses including Techniques of Programming, Data Structures, Computer Systems and Organization, Operating Systems, Computer Networking, and Ethical Issues in Computer Science, as well as leading the Social Justice in Context Maymester program in Bangalore, India.