Dr. Heming Cui has been selected for the Faculty Knowledge Exchange Award 2022 in recognition of his outstanding accomplishments achieved in his KE project named "UTEE: A Secure, Efficient, and Portable Distributed Bigdata Computing System on Heterogeneous Trusted Execution Devices".
UTEE (Ubiquitous Trusted Execution Environment) is a secure, easy-to-use, and high-performance distributed bigdata computing supporting system. UTEE can protect the confidentiality and integrity of plaintext queries in general bigdata computing software (e.g., Spark) against various malicious parties in clouds, including malicious code in high-privileged cloud management software (e.g., operating systems and virtual machines) and malicious cloud administrators. The UTEE project develops new programming language techniques and security protocols in order to automatically protect existing, readily mature bigdata queries written by the research and industrial communities using high-level programming languages (e.g., Java and Python), eliminating the need of modifying these queries.
UTEE has become the core software system of Huawei's Trusted and Intelligent Cloud Service (or TICS, see https://www.huaweicloud.com/product/tics.html) launched in Apr 2021. Therefore, UTEE is usable by Huawei Cloud's over 3 million customers (including enterprises and individuals) in 170 countries. In May 2022, Dr. Cui's UTEE project also received an ITF ITSP grant award of HKD 3.3 million, in which 10% of the funding is donated by Huawei.
