Security

No computing system is perfect; during the course of development issues are introduced which, under particular circumstances, can cause the system to enter an unanticipated state. Such failures can be the result of developers misusing programming language features or libraries, or not taking into account complex interactions between hardware, systems software, and the program they are developing. When a user of a system is able to exploit a failure in order to do harm, we term the issue a vulnerability. It is the goal of computer security research to develop mechanisms that mitigate such vulnerabilities, by detecting them, repairing them, or ensuring that they are not introduced in the first place.

Research in computer security at the University of Arizona has two main foci: analysis of malicious binary code [Debray] and the protection of systems from reverse engineering [Collberg]. Current research projects include code obfuscation using covert channels [Collberg and Debray], generic approaches to deobfuscation [Debray], and transformations to disrupt symbolic execution [Collberg] .

2024

"Control-Flow Deobfuscation using Trace-Informed Compositional Program Synthesis" OOPSLA 2024
R. Giacobazzi, I. Mastroeni, and E. Perantoni. Adversities in Abstract Interpretation - Accommodating Robustness by Abstract Interpretation. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems TOPLAS 46(2) Article No.: 5, Pages 1 - 31, 2024.

2022

R. Giacobazzi and I. Mastroeni. Property-Driven Code Obfuscations: Reinterpreting Jones-Optimality in Abstract Interpretation. The Static Analysis - 29th International Symposium, SAS 2022, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 13790, pp. 247-271. Auckland, New Zealand, December 5-7, 2022.

2016

"Repeatability in computer systems research" CACM 2016

NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (2021 - estimated 2025) "SaTC: TTP: Medium: The Tigress Endpoint Protection Tool"

NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (2020 - estimated 2025) "SaTC: EDU: LIGERLabs: Educational Modules for (Anti-)Reverse Engineering"

Security Faculty

Christian Collberg

Professor
Office: GS 758
Research Interests: Security, software protection, reverse engineering, research ethics
(Ph.D., University of Lund, 1992)

520-621-6612 collberg@cs.arizona.edu

Saumya Debray

Professor
Office: GS 735
Research Interests: Compilers, program analysis and optimization, programming language implementation.
(Ph.D., The State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1986)

520-621-4527 debray@cs.arizona.edu

Roberto Giacobazzi

Professor
Office: GS 711
Interests: Theory of computation, programming languages, abstract interpretation, program analysis and verification, logic in computer science, history of computing.
(Ph.D., University of Pisa in Italy, 1993)

giacobazzi@arizona.edu