Currently
I am currently a PhD student and Teaching Assistant at Birmingham University since the 1st of October 2007 supervised by Dr. Hayo Thielecke. If you find my name hard to pronounce, you might be interested in the pronounciation and etymology page. Here is a mugshot self-taken picture of me, not so long ago.
My work tries to explore computer security at software level and tries to reason about programming mechanics. Most common pitfalls in computer security are often due to the underlying code. Reasons are numerous spanning from simple things such as memory allocation/accessing, format string manipulations, integer handling and up to more complex subjects such as concurrency. This leads to problems more commonly known as buffer overflows, format string attacks, code injections, integer overflows and so on...
We use different types of logics to reason about program flow and try to determine the cause of such errors within the program. Using this knowledge we can create a type-safe language and try to avoid these undetectable errors altogether at code level through either run-time or static checks similar to what has been done in Cyclone and Vault. However, neither of the two do not provide a stable basis for either security nor complete functionality.
