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Computer Science Professor Tevfik Bultan has been awarded a DARPA grant for his project “Integrated Symbolic execution for Space-Time Analysis of Code (ISSTAC)”.

The project abstract states, “We propose to develop new analysis techniques and tools for the identification and verification of complexity-related vulnerabilities and side-channel attacks for Java bytecode. Specifically, our proposed work aims to develop scalable and effective techniques to identify vulnerabilities related to space and time resource usage behavior of Java based software systems. Our proposed techniques are based on a novel combination of symbolic execution, model counting, and quantitative and qualitative analysis.”

This is a multi-year collaborative research project with researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University, the Vanderbilt University and the Queen Mary University of London. The award includes a total funding of about 6 million dollars, and about 1.4 million dollars of the funding is allocated to the UCSB portion of the project.

Prof. Bultan is looking for post-doctoral scholars and graduate students to join this exciting project. To learn more about how to apply visit here.

Prof. Bultan and his students have already published two research papers based on the work they have done on this project: "Automata-based model counting for string constraints,” which was published in the Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2015), and "Automatically Computing Path Complexity of Programs,’’ which was published in the Proceedings of the 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2015).

Prof. Bultan directs the Verification Laboratory at UCSB.  He is an internationally recognized research leader in automated verification, program analysis, formal methods, and software engineering areas. He is the recipient of two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards. Two of his PhD students received the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award and the UCSB Computer Science Outstanding Dissertation Award. Prof. Bultan co-chaired the program committees of WS-FM 2010, ATVA 2011, FSE 2012 (the flagship conference of ACM SIGSOFT), and ASE 2013. He is currently serving as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering. He was a keynote speaker at CONCUR 2008, MEMOCODE 2008, PASTE 2008, FACS 2012, FORTE/FMOODS 2013, and SPIN 2015. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2000.
 

To learn more about Professor Bultan and his work, visit his website here.