Formal methods

Both sound software verification techniques and heuristic software flaw-finding tools benefit from the presence of software annotations that describe the behavior of software components. Function summaries (in the form of logical annotations) allow modular checking of software and more precise reasoning. However, such annotations are difficult to write and not commonly produced by software developers, despite their benefits to static analysis. The Crowdsourcing Annotations project will address this deficiency by encouraging software-community-based crowd-sourced generation of annotations.

This project is developing tools and techniques for cost-effective evaluation of the trustworthiness of mobile applications (apps). The work focuses on enterprise scenarios, in which personnel at a business or government agency use mission-related apps and access enterprise networks.

Computers and people live in a world governed by policy. At the lowest level, policies determine how information flows within networks; at the highest level, they describe how users' personal information is shared across applications. Of course, end-users, as policy authors, make mistakes: rules can have unintended consequences and multiple policies can interact in ways that their authors didn't intend. Users can benefit from tools to help them understand the policies they write and maintain. Policy analysis refers to rigorous methods for detecting these situations before they cause harm.

Information about individuals is collected by a variety of organizations including government agencies, banks, hospitals, research institutions, and private companies. In many cases, sharing this data among organizations can bring benefits in social, scientific, business, and security domains, as the collected information is of similar nature, of about similar populations. However, much of this collected data is sensitive as it contains personal information, or information that could damage an organization's reputation or competitiveness.

Distributed applications (such as web applications and cloud-based applications, where multiple computers cooperate to run the application) are becoming increasingly common. Given the amount of commercial activity and information handled by these distributed applications, it is important that these applications are correct, reliable, and efficient. However, many traditional tools and techniques for programmers cannot be used for distributed applications, making it difficult for programmers to write and debug distributed applications.