QIF People


David Clark, Sebastian Hunt and Pasquale Malacaria have been collaborating on quantitative information flow for programming languages since 2001. The resulting work includes: [4,6,7,8,9]. All three were members of the founding programme committee for the First International Workshop on Programming Language Interference and Dependence (PLID 2004).

David Clark

David Clark gained his PhD at Imperial College in 1996, supervised by Chris Hankin. His thesis work addressed the problem of the correctness of the strictness analyser in the CLEAN compiler, also the subject of a later paper with Chris Hankin and Sebastian Hunt [3]. He was a co-writer of the EPSRC grant proposal ``Abstract Interpretation of Safety Critical Systems'' (GR/L80065/01(P)) and was subsequently employed on that grant as an RA from 1998-2000. He was appointed as a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, King's College London, in 2001. He has continued to work on safety related and embedded systems with Kevin Lano and others since being appointed to King's College: he was on the program committee for ROOM 2002 and has recently been working with Juan Bicarregui on safety critical system visualisation.

His current interests include security, particularly language-based security properties as well as data mining for unsupervised fraud and intrusion detection. In 2001/2 he collaborated with Hankin and Hunt on the analysis of dependency in Algol-like languages [2].

Sebastian Hunt

Sebastian Hunt has been a lecturer in the Department of Computing at City University since 1992. Prior to that, he was employed as an RA on the European grants Semantique (BRA 3124) and Semagraph (BRA 3074). While working as an RA he also studied for his PhD, supervised by Chris Hankin, awarded in 1992. While at City he has been the holder of a Nuffield Foundation grant and an EPSRC travel grant. In [10,11,12] he pioneered the use of abstract interpretation over lattices of relations for the analysis of various types of dependency in software. In 2001/2 he collaborated with Clark and Hankin on the analysis of dependency in Algol-like languages [2]. In 2003 he presented joint work with Clark and Malacaria on quantitative information flow [5] as an invited participant in the 2003 Dagstuhl Seminar on Language Based Security (Dagstuhl Seminar 03411). He was organising co-chair for PLID 2004.

His current research interests include program analysis and abstract interpretation, particularly in application to problems in language-based security.

Pasquale Malacaria

Pasquale Malacaria is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on application of information theory to the analysis of software systems.

Pasquale Malacaria did his masters thesis in Rome with lambda calculus scientist C. Bohm followed by a PhD in Paris with Linear Logic creator J.Y. Girard on Stone Duality for sequential functions. He then moved to London where he coauthored the paper ``Full abstraction for PCF'' with S. Abramsky and R. Jagadeesan [1]. The paper, by building a syntax independent model of PCF (a long standing open problem in the semantics of programming languages), established Game semantics as an important tool in the semantics of programming languages and was pivotal in the creation of this new research field.

In 1996 he was awarded an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship to further his work on Game semantics. He has worked with Chris Hankin at Imperial College on applications of Game semantics to program analysis, collaboration which led to the publication of several algorithms for program analysis based on Game semantics [13,14].

His interests vary from theoretical investigations to software writing. He has implemented a control flow analyser for an object oriented lambda calculus, a model checker for the mu-calculus and several other research-based and educational systems.

Malacaria has held two EPSRC grants B/95/AF/2115 and two European Community grants (Human Capital and Mobility fellowship and BRA6811) and has been co-investigator in the EPSRC grant GR/L40403.

He has also been supervisor of an EPSRC funded PhD student, Russ Harmer, who successfully completed his PhD in 1999 and is now ``charge de recherche'' at CNRS in Paris.

Bibliography


1
S. Abramsky, R. Jaghadeesan, and P. Malacaria.
Full abstraction for pcf.
Information and Computation, 163:409-470, December 2000.
2
D. Clark, C. Hankin, and S. Hunt.
Information flow for algol-like languages.
Computer Languages (Special Issue: Computer Languages and Security), 28(1):3-28, April 2002.
3
David Clark, Chris Hankin, and Sebastian Hunt.
Safety of strictness analysis via term graph rewriting.
In Jens Palsberg, editor, Static Analysis, 7th International Symposium, SAS 2000, Santa Barbara, CA, USA, June 29 - July 1, 2000, Proceedings, volume 1824 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 95-114. Springer, 2000.
4
David Clark, Sebastian Hunt, and Pasquale Malacaria.
Quantitative analysis of the leakage of confidential data.
In Alessandra Di Pierro and Herbert Wiklicky, editors, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, volume 59. Elsevier, 2002.
5
David Clark, Sebastian Hunt, and Pasquale Malacaria.
Quantified interference for a while language.
Technical report, King's College London, 2003.
6
David Clark, Sebastian Hunt, and Pasquale Malacaria.
Quantified interference for a while language.
In Proceedings of The Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages, Barcelona, April 2004.
7
David Clark, Sebastian Hunt, and Pasquale Malacaria.
Quantified interference: Information theory and information flow.
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Security 2004, Barcelona, April 2004.
8
David Clark, Sebastian Hunt, and Pasquale Malacaria.
Weak observers.
In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Programming Interference and Dependence, Verona, Italy, August 2004.
9
David Clark, Sebastian Hunt, and Pasquale Malacaria.
Quantitative information flow, relations, and polymorphic types.
Journal of Logic and Computation, 2005.
To appear.
10
Sebastian Hunt.
Abstract Interpretation of Functional Languages: From Theory to Practice.
PhD thesis, Department of Computing, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, 1991.
11
Sebastian Hunt.
Pers generalise projections for strictness analysis (extended abstract).
In Proc. 1990 Glasgow Workshop on Functional Programming, Workshops in Computing, Ullapool, 1991. Springer-Verlag.
12
Sebastian Hunt and David Sands.
Binding time analysis: a new perspective.
In Proc. PEPM'91: Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation. ACM Press, 1991.
13
P. Malacaria and C. Hankin.
Generalised flowcharts and games.
In Proceedings of the 25th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, pages 363-374. Springer-Verlag, 1998.
14
P. Malacaria and C. Hankin.
Non-deterministic games and program analysis: an application to security.
In Proceedings of Logic in Computer Science (LICS). IEEE Press, 1999.