Post-doctoral Researcher on Applications

Post-Doctoral Researcher on Applications of Control-flow Equivalence to Systems and Security Computer science » Computer systems Computer science » Programming Recognised Researcher (R2) Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Not Applicable Hours Per Week 38.0 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No Offer Description Applications are invited for a fully funded three-year postdoctoral position aimed at the intersection of theoretical computer science, computer systems, and security. The topic of the research will be centered on applying techniques from automata theory and programming language semantics within program similarity detection, with applications to recurrent vulnerability detection, as well as optimizing compilers, with a focus on code specialization and abstraction. This is a unique position that involves skills both in theory and software implementation. In more detail, programming language theory commonly uses automata to describe the behavior of a program from an operational point of view; in systems, control flow graphs can be seen as a different approach to the same principle, used to reason about (among other matters) compiler optimization. In this project, we will investigate theoretical methods to represent control flow graphs as automata and subsequently apply these novel methods in the domains of computer systems as well as security. Within computer systems, we wish to investigate more relaxed implementations of function merging based on bisimulation. In security, we will use these theoretical foundations to develop code equivalence and similarity detection methods, possibly using SMT-based techniques. Key publications: - Outrunning Big KATs: Efficient Decision Procedures for Variants of GKAT. Cheng Zhang, Qiancheng Fu, Hang Ji, Ines Santacruz Del Valle, Alexandra Sil...