Research Interests



My main area of research is program analysis. This concerns in particular quantitative aspects of programming languages and systems. In order to provide a sound foundational basis for the application of formal methods I am also strongly involved in research related to the semantics of programming languages, again focused in particular on probabilistic models. More recently, my work started to extend into semantics based program synthesis, transformation, and optimisation.

The main application area for my work on program analysis and semantics is in computer security in particular questions related to language based security, quantitative information flow, covert channels, confinement notions and properties, obfuscation and watermarking. In this area my interest is not just in discovering security violations, but also in measures and quantification of, for example, covert channel capacity, quality of obfuscation, etc. Ideas from program transformation and synthesis provide in my opinion a way for developing counter-measures to security attacks in the form of, for example, cost-effective program modifications.

Not least as an fascinating field in itself which provides non-conventional models and challenges I also have a very strong interest in quantum computation, although this is at the moment not an active research area.