I am pursuing a PhD thesis in virtualization and virtual machine security at Université Grenoble Alpes, which I started in April 2023 (expected defense: April 2027). This PhD is under the direction of Pr Alain TCHANA and Dr Renaud Lachaize. It is a CIFRE thesis, which means that it is done in partnership with a company in France. The company where I am working is Orange Innovation of the Orange Group, and my company supervisor is Kahina Lazri. My work is mainly about building a framework for virtual machine observation: making virtual machine introspection (VMI) able to fill the semantic gap and perform a seamless observation of a target machine. In this context, I designed and developed GOODKIT, a novel Live VM Introspection framework written in Rust and C that leverages co-located side-VMs for native-speed target access and strong isolation. I implemented fine-grained, lock-aware memory coherence mechanisms and kernel probing subsystems within the Firecracker VMM and the Linux kernel, bridging the gap between secure monitoring and production cloud performance. This work led to a publication at OSDI 2026.

I already have some experience in virtualization. First, when I was in M1 at the National Advanced School of Engineering of Yaoundé, I did an internship working on the synchronization of a distributed shared memory (DSM) in GiantVM, a virtual machine monitor (VMM) developed at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This internship was under the supervision of Pr Alain TCHANA. I implemented a write-update protocol in it and performed some other optimizations. The main goal of that topic was to perform a study of the implementation of a distributed hypervisor, focusing on the memory management part. This led to a publication in a workshop named SPMA (Systems for Post-Moore Architectures), co-located with Eurosys 2022. The paper is available here.

In my second year of master’s at Yaoundé, I worked on the performance optimization of a distributed hypervisor developed in the laboratory where I worked: Laboratoire d’Informatique du Parallélisme. That hypervisor is called Scalevisor. It was under the supervision of Alain TCHANA.

I hold a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, which I completed in 2021-2022. The internship that I did there was about the virtualization of a novel PIM (Processing-In-Memory) hardware developed by UPMEM, a Grenoble startup. It is the first commercially usable PIM hardware available. I worked on the virtualization of such hardware to make it usable in the cloud for everyone. This work led to a publication at Middleware 2024.

I have a Bachelor’s Degree equivalent in Computer Engineering from the National Advanced School of Engineering of Yaoundé, Cameroon.

Research Interests

I am primarily interested in :

• Memory management in operating systems
• Memory and device virtualization
• Hypervisor-related topics

Extra Info

I like music, reading, video games and some more things. I am a Christian and love giving joy to people around me. ^_^