Research interests

It is too hard to build trustworthy software systems using conventional systems APIs. I work on higher-level, language-based abstractions for programming that better address important cross-cutting concerns: security, extensibility, persistence, distribution.

Selected recent publications

A system and language that provides a higher-level abstraction for building secure distributed systems.

A new language mechanism that supports type-safe extension and evolution of complex software systems.

A type system enforces sound object initialization, including cyclic data structures. The end of null-pointer exceptions?

Conventional measures of quantitative information flow are based on uncertainty, but accuracy is a better basis.

The first implemented voting system that offers universal verifiability and coercion resistance.

[Undergraduate and MEng research opportunities]

Awards

Current Projects

• Civitas: A practical, secure, remote voting system.
• Swift: Making web applications secure by construction.
• SIF: Servlets with secure information flow.
• Fabric: A federated system for securely storing, sharing, and computing information.
• Integrating security and fault tolerance
• Jx/J&: a language for extensible, composable software frameworks
• Jif: an extended version of Java that protects privacy by controlling information flow
• JMatch: a Java extension with pattern matching and interruptible iterators
• Polyglot: a widely used, extensible Java compiler front end framework for rapid experimentation with new language extensions.
• Program Committees: Co-chair, IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy '09; PC Member, ACM 2010 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), ACM 2009 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), IEEE Computer Security Foundations 2009 (CSF)
• Editorial Board, Journal of Computer Security and ACM Transactions on Information and System Security

Older Projects

• Program Committees: ACM SIGPLAN Types in Language Design and Implementation (TLDI) 2009, ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages and Analysis for Security '08 (PLAS), SOSP ('01, '07), OOPSLA'06, HOTDEP'06, CSFW '04, '06, USENIX Security 2006, FAST'05, POPL'05, OSDI ('00, '04), CCS'04, SIGOPS European Workshop '04, IEEE Security and Privacy ('01, '04, '07, '08), NDSS'04, PLDI'02, FOOL'00.
• STONESOUP: a study on how to certify and run software of uncertain provenance securely
• DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group (ISAT), 2005–2008
• Jif/split: a version of Jif that automatically partitions programs to run securely on a distributed system.
• J₀: Java for novice programmers
• PolyJ: an extended version of Java that supports parametric polymorphism, freely available for both Windows and Unix.
• Thor, a distributed object-oriented database, and Theta, the internal programming language of Thor. This work provided scalable techniques for efficiently implementing distributed, persistent objects and language features such as methods and parametric polymorphism.
• Organizer, Dagstuhl seminar on Mobility, Ubiquity, and Security (Feb.'07)
• Invited and keynote talks: FMOODS 2008
ESOP'05, PASTE'05, FMSE 2005

Courses

• PLDI 2006 tutorial: Expressing and Enforcing Security with Programming Languages
• Summer School on Software Security, June 2004
• CGO'03 tutorial: Security through Languages and Compilers
• CS211, Computers and Programming (S06)
• CS3110/312, Data Structures and Functional Programming (S02–S04,S07,S08,F08) [CS312 Tournaments]
• CS4120/4121 (old 412/413), Introduction to Compilers (S99–S01,F09)
• CS504, Applied Systems Engineering I (F00–F04)
• CS513, System Security (F06)
• CS611, Advanced Programming Languages (F99–F01, F04–F05, F07)
• CS711, Advanced Programming Languages Seminar ( F02, F03)
• Engineering 150 (F04, F06)
• CS754, Cornell Systems Lunch (2001–2008) (with E. Gün Sirer, Paul Francis, Robbert van Renesse)