[CSE Seminar] REMINDER: Seminar by Prof Peter Thiemann, MONDAY 19 March 2012, 11AM

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

We are having the pleasure to host Peter Thiemann from the University of Freiburg at UNSW at the moment. His many contributions span the areas of functional programming, type systems, static analysis, program specialisation, and web programming.

-=- CSE Seminar, 19 March 2012, 11AM -=-

Location: CSE Seminar room (K17_113), Level 1, CSE Building (K17)
<http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/contact/map.html>

Title: A Calculus for Gradual Access Control
Speaker: Peter Thiemann (University of Freiburg, Germany)

Abstract

Many client-side Web applications are composed of script fragments that are independently downloaded from the Web. A recurring problem in that scenario is the need to impose an access control policy on the execution of a downloaded script. No script should be able to compromise the state of the base application, that is, it should neither access nor change sensitive data, which can be private data of the application, sensitive state of the browser, or a part of the DOM that is not explicitly assigned to it.

To address this situation, we want to construct a browser-embedded facility that regulates access control according to directives in a trusted program fragment. The calculus for gradual access control is the foundation of this facility. It incorporates a component that performs dynamic access control according to the directives. It also incorporates a static component that enables the system to omit the dynamic checks if it can prove them unnecessary. The two components are tightly connected by a gradual typing approach.

Bio

Peter Thiemann obtained his diploma in computer science in 1987 at the Technical University of Aachen, Germany. He graduated in 1991 at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where worked as a research and teaching assistent until 1997. In 1998, he was a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, England. Since 1999 he is a professor at the computer science department of the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he leads the programming languages group.

His research interests comprise theory and practice of modern programming languages, in particular program analysis, compiler construction, and program specialization for functional programming languages. The focus of his current research is static and dynamic program analysis for scripting languages.