Author Archives: Michael Hicks

Rise of the Robots: Review and Reflection

I recently read Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots with the UMD CS faculty book club. The book considers the impact of the growth of information technology (IT) on the human labor market, and how the trend towards greater automation could eventually eliminate a substantial number of jobs. The result could be a radical, and disruptive, reshaping of the global economy.81fncUPB6cL

I would recommend the book. I found it well-written and thought provoking. Ford capably argues from past economic and technology trends and also digs into particular problems, products, and research in order to extrapolate future impact. Of the ten faculty who discussed the book, nine of us (including me) were convinced that future automation will be increasingly disruptive to human labor markets.

While reading the book, I found myself wondering about my own role, and that of my field, in addressing this situation we’ve contributed to. Many computer scientists have high-minded ideals and wish to help society through IT innovation. What can we do to ensure that those ideals are realized, rather than perverted into the dystopian future that Ford is warning us about? Continue reading

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Filed under Algorithms, Book Reviews, Policy, Software engineering

SecDev: Bringing Security Innovation Into Design & Development

The IEEE Cybersecurity Development (SecDev) Conference is a new conference focused on designing and building systems to be secure. It will be offered for the first time in Boston, MA, on November 3-4, 2016. This event was conceived, and is being organized, by Rob Cunningham; I’m pleased to be the PC Chair.

As stated in the call for papers, this first iteration of the conference is seeking short (5-page) papers, extended (1-page) abstracts, and tutorial proposals. The submission deadline is June 21, 2016 — if you have new results, old results you’d like to repackage, a tool, a process, a vision, or an idea you’d like to share with those working to make systems more secure, please consider submitting a paper!

This blog post explains why I think we need  this conference, what I expect the first year to look like, and what sort of papers we hope to get, in question & answer format. Continue reading

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Filed under Process, Research, Software Security

Interview with Matt Might, Part 2

Matt Might at the White House, Jan 2015

Matt at the White House, Jan 2015

This post is the second part of my March 10th interview of Matt Might, a PL researcher and Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Utah.

In Part I, we talked about Matt’s academic background, his PL research (including his favorite among the papers he’s written), and his work on understanding and treating rare disease, which began with the quest to diagnose his son Bertrand, and has led to a role in the President’s Initiative on Precision Medicine.

In this post, our conversation continues, covering the topics of blogging, privacy, managing a crazy schedule, and looking ahead to promising PL research directions. Continue reading

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Filed under Bioinformatics, Interviews, Language adoption, Probabilistic programming, Program Analysis, Scientists, Software Security, Types

Interview with Matt Might

This post presents an interview I did on March 10th, 2015, with Matt Might, a PL researcher who is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah.

Matt Might headshot

Matt Might

Matt has made strong scientific contributions to the field of programming languages, and he has done much more. He maintains an incredibly popular blog on wide-ranging topics (13 million pageviews since 2009 on topics from abstract interpretation to how to lose weight to how to be more productive). He has also become deeply committed to supporting people with rare diseases, including his own son, Bertrand, who was the first person diagnosed with NGLY1 deficiency. His work on rare disease propelled him to the White House: He met the President on January 31st, 2015, and he took a position in the Executive Office of the President to accelerate the implementation of the Precision Medicine Initiative on March 21st.

We had an engaging conversation covering all of these topics. It is too long for one post, so this post is the first of two. Continue reading

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Filed under Abstract interpretation, Bioinformatics, Dynamic languages, Interviews, Program Analysis, Science, Scientists

DARPA STAC: Challenge-driven Cybersecurity Research

Last week I attended a multi-day meeting for the DARPA STAC program; I am the PI of a UMD-led team. STAC supports research to develop “Space/time Analysis for Cybersecurity.” More precisely, the goal is to develop tools that can analyze software to find exploitable side channels or denial-of-service attacks involving space usage or running time.

In general, DARPA programs focus on a very specific problem, and so are different from the NSF style of funded research that I’m used to, in which the problem, solution, and evaluation approach are proposed by each investigator. One of STAC’s noteworthy features is its use of engagements, during which research teams use their tools to find vulnerabilities in challenge problems produced by an independent red team. Our first engagement was last week, and I found the experience very compelling. I think that both the NSF style and the DARPA style have benefits, and it’s great that both styles are available.

This post talks about my experience with STAC so far. I discuss the interesting PL research challenges the program presents, the use of engagements, and the opportunities STAC’s organizational structure offers, when done right.

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Filed under Process, Program Analysis, Research, Science, Software Security

Software Security Ideas Ahead of Their Time

[This post was conceived and co-authored by Andrew Ruef, Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, working with me. –Mike]

As researchers, we are often asked to look into a crystal ball. We try to anticipate future problems so that work we begin now will help address those problems before they become acute. Sometimes, a researcher guesses the problem and its possible solution, but chooses not to pursue it. In a sense, she has found, and discarded, an idea ahead of its time.

Recently, a friend of Andrew’s pointed him to a 20-year-old email exchange on the “firewalls” mailing list that blithely suggests, and discards, problems and solutions that are now quite relevant, and on the cutting edge of software security research. The situation is both entertaining and instructive, especially in that the ideas are quite squarely in the domain of programming languages research, but were not considered by PL researchers at the time (as far as we know).

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Filed under PL in practice, Research, Research directions, Software Security

Promoting Research Quality

Consider this claim

Quality is more important than quantity

I expect few people would disagree with it, and yet we do not always act as if it were true. In Academia, when considering candidates to hire or promote, we count their papers, their citations, their funding, their software download rates, their graduated students, the number of their committee memberships or journal editorships, and more.

Researchers are getting the message: quantity matters. Ugo Bardi proposes the economic underpinnings of this apparent trend, cleverly arguing that scientific papers are currency, subject to phenomena like inflation (more papers!), assaying (peer review validates papers, which support funding proposals, which finance more papers), and counterfeiting (papers published without review by unscrupulous publishers). Moshe Vardi, in a recent blog post, concurs that “we have slid down the slippery path of using quantity as a proxy for quality” and that “the inflationary pressure to publish more and more encourages speed and brevity, rather than careful scholarship.”[ref]Update 8/21/2016: As more evidence of the problem, here’s a great retrospective from the editor of a top journal in sociology points to quantity greatly devaluing quality.[/ref]

In this post I consider the problem of incentivizing, and assessing, research quality, starting with a recent set of guidelines put out by the CRA. I conclude with a set of questions—I hope you will share your opinion. Continue reading

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Filed under Process, Research, Science

From ‘Penetrate and Patch’ to ‘Building Security In’

This year I was pleased to be named one of U. Maryland’s Distinguished Scholar-Teachers (DSTs). This recognition, awarded to a few UMD faculty each year, is given to those who have shown success both in teaching and research. I put a lot of energy into both of these activities, so it was a great feeling to be recognized as a DST.

hicks-dst-talkOne of the consequences of accepting the award is that you must give a lecture about your research/interests to a general audience. I gave my talk, titled From ‘Penetrate and Patch’ to ‘Building Security In’, on Monday.

My Department Chair, Samir Khuller, a DST himself, told me that I should aim the talk for an eighth grade level, i.e., an audience with only a cursory understanding of computer science. But of course it’s not quite that simple: only some people who attend will be at that level; many who attend will have a stronger background because they will be interested in the topic. So as I was preparing my talk last week I tried to make it so the generalists would not get lost, and the specialists would not get bored.

The point of my talk is that our cybersecurity woes are often (but not always) due to vulnerable software. While firewalls, anti-virus, and other security products stem the tide of attacks, these products are not addressing the root problem. Once software vulnerabilties are discovered they can be patched, but this “penetrate and patch” approach is not working: unpatched systems remain vulnerable, and even when they are the patched there are probably other latent vulnerabilities that remain. “Penetrate and patch” also doesn’t address the new vulnerabilities that are introduced as the software evolves.

So we need shift our mentality to building security in: We should aim to build software that is free of vulnerabilities (or far more likely to be free of them) right from the start.

640px-Building_bridges,_Fuling_Wujiang_Bridge

To get this idea across to a general audience I used bridge-building as a motivation: We use the best designs, methods, and tools to build bridges that stand up to heavy use and extreme conditions. Then I talked about what software is — basically how it works — and how some software bugs can be exploited to deleterious effect. I showed, at least at a high level, how a buffer overflow works. Then I showed how language design and other PL-style research products are analogous to the best tools and methods of bridge-building, and can therefore help us avoid buffer overflows and other problems. I also described how — through my coursera software security class and the build-it, break-it, fix-it contest[ref]The next iteration of the contest starts Thursday, October 1 — not too late to sign up![/ref] — I am trying to encourage this mentality of building secure software from the start, not just leaving security to the last.

I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. Because of having to account for a broad audience, I spent a lot of time on the talk — probably as much as I did on my tenure/promotion talk! My in-laws were in attendance and they told me they understood things pretty well, and that the talk put the trajectory of recent security breaches in perspective.

A link to a video of the talk and slides is here (the proper talk starts at about the 3-minute mark):

https://www.cs.umd.edu/event/2015/09/penetrate-and-patch-building-security

The audio isn’t great, and the slides are a little hard to see (but there’s a link to the PDF), but I think it’s watchable. I’d be very curious for your feedback. I hope you will share the link with friends, tech-savvy or not, who might wonder what this cybersecurity stuff is all about, and how PL research and methods can play a important role in addressing it.

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Filed under Education, Software Security

Interview with Facebook’s Peter O’Hearn

pete-1In this post, I interview Peter O’Hearn, programming languages professor, researcher, and evangelist. Peter now works at Facebook on the Infer static analyzer, which was publicly released back in June 2015. In this interview we take a brief tour of Peter’s background (including his favorite papers) and the path that led him and Infer to Facebook. We discuss how Infer is impacting mobile application development at Facebook, and what Peter hopes it can achieve next. Peter also shares some lessons he’s learned at Facebook regarding PL research and the sometimes surprising impact PL researchers can and are having on industrial software development.

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Filed under Interviews, PL in practice, Program Analysis, Scientists

What is a bug?

Buggy software doesn’t work. According to wikipedia

A software bug is an error … in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program’s source code or its design ...

When something is wrong with a program, we rarely hear of it having one bug — we hear of it having many bugs. I’m wondering: Where does one bug end and the next bug begin?

To answer this question, we need an operational definition of a bug, not the indirect notion present in the Wikipedia quote.[ref]Andreas Zeller, in his book Why Programs Fail, prefers the term defect to bug since the latter term is sometimes used to refer to erroneous behavior, rather than erroneous code. I stick with the term bug, in this post, and use it to mean the problematic code (only).[/ref]

This post starts to explore such a definition, but I’m not satisfied with it yet — I’m hoping you will provide your thoughts in the comments to move it forward.

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Filed under Semantics, Software engineering