Chris Hawblitzel

331 Upson Hall
Computer Science Department
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853

(607) 255-0102
hawblitz@cs.cornell.edu

Research

My interests are in parallel processing, safe languages, and operating systems. In particular, as a member of the Safe Language Kernel group I am interested in using safe languages to provide a level of protection normally provided by operating systems based on virtual memory. This idea has been explored in single-user systems such as Pilot and Oberon, but current safe language environments do not have the support for revocation and resource management needed for more demanding multi-user environments.

Safe language protection has come into widespread use with the advent of Java applets. Current applet security models are based on a distinction between trusted system code and untrusted applet code. System code is allowed to share objects and classes with applets, but there is no interface for allowing applets to share with each other. In my work on the J-Kernel project, I've tried to generalize this model by allowing all code, trusted and untrusted, to share objects and classes. At the same time, I've tried to keep this sharing manageable by limiting the types of objects and classes that different tasks are allowed to share, and ensuring that any resource that one task shares with another can later be revoked.

I'm currently exploring how revocation and resource management can be built directly into a safe language, in order to allow sharing at a more fine-grained level than is currently possible in the J-Kernel.

My advisor is Thorsten von Eicken.

Publications

Tasks and Revocation for Java (or, Hey! You got your Operating System in my Language!). Chris Hawblitzel and Thorsten von Eicken. November 13, 1999 Draft. postscript
Type System Support for Dynamic Revocation. Chris Hawblitzel and Thorsten von Eicken. In ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Compiler Support for System Software, May 1999. postscript
A Case for Language-Based Protection. Chris Hawblitzel and Thorsten von Eicken. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Technical Report TR98-1670, March 1998. postscript
Implementing Multiple Protection Domains in Java. C. Hawblitzel, C-C. Chang, G. Czajkowski, D. Hu, and T. von Eicken. USENIX Annual Technical Conference, June 1998. html, postscript
Low Latency Communication on the IBM RS/6000 SP. C-C. Chang, G. Czajkowski, C. Hawblitzel, and T. von Eicken. ACM/IEEE Supercomputing (SC96), November 1996. html postscript

Teaching

I taught the second half of CS 213, C++ programming, in Spring '98.