Each year, the cloud storage technology company NetApp honors faculty from around the globe through its NetApp Faculty Fellowship (NFF) program. This year, one of the fellowship recipients was CSL’s Jian Huang, recognized for his work with secure storage systems.

NFF selects recipients who have shown that their research could make a significant and relevant contributions to the greater body of work in the storage and data management field. The award was established to encourage leading-edge research in storage and data management and to foster relationships between academic researchers and NetApp’s technical community.

The project that got Huang nominated for the award involves building a secure flash-based storage system. Huang is working to build a hardware-assisted security system to protect valuable software, rather than relying on the software itself to do all the work. Huang believes this to be a pragmatic solution.

“This is another way to think of how we utilize hardware properties to enhance the security,” Huang said. “The proposed solution is quite practical because we leverage existing hardware and storage devices without requiring additional hardware cost.”

The fellowships comes with a monetary stipend to continue the recipient’s research for one year. If progress is made, the funding may continue.