People

Dr Paul Ezhilchelvan

Paul Ezhilchelvan began his research career in the mid 1980’s by developing system architectures and consensus protocols resilient to ‘Byzantine’ failures which were then a newly identified failure mode in which a threat actor takes control of a system despite preventive and detective measures. He has developed VOLTAN node architectures, which were subsequently patented as building-blocks for constructing intrusion-resilient distributed systems, and fair-exchange systems wherein threats can lead to operational interferences at carefully-chosen timing instances. His expertise relevant to Cybersecurity and Resilience research includes: intrusion-resilient service replication strategies, consensus algorithms design amidst uncertainties in communication delays, crash-tolerant concurrency control protocols for distributed databases, performance modelling and evaluation, and engineering distributed systems for verifiable trust. He has more than 50 publications in refereed IEEE/ACM conferences and journals and has successfully supervised 23 PhD students so far. He currently investigates the task of designing a friction-reduced mortgage processing system using Blockchain in collaboration with Atom Bank, Durham and is a Research Consultant for Neo4J, the internationally leading vendor for Graph Databases.