Stephen Chong

Research Interests

My research aims to help programmers write trustworthy programs. My primary area of interest is language-based information security: using programming language techniques to provide information security assurance.

Recent publications

• Asynchronous Functional Reactive Programming for GUIs, PLDI 2013 (with Evan Czaplicki).
• Towards Fully Automatic Placement of Security Sanitizers and Declassifiers, POPL 2013 (with Benjamin Livshits).
• Required Information Release, Journal of Computer Security 20(6), 2012.
• Towards a Practical Secure Concurrent Language, OOPSLA 2012 (with Stefan Muller).
• Precise Enforcement of Progress-Sensitive Security, CCS 2012 (with Scott Moore and Aslan Askarov).
• Learning is Change in Knowledge: Knowledge-based Security for Dynamic Policies, CSF 2012 (with Aslan Askarov).
• More...

Teaching

In Fall 2013 I am teaching CS 252r, a graduate seminar on programming languages. This year, the course will focus on the science of cybersecurity. More details coming over summer... In Spring 2014 I will teach CS 152, an undergraduate course that considers the formal foundations of programming languages.

Previous courses:

• CS 61: Systems Programming and Computer Organization Fall 2010, Fall 2011.
• CS 152: Programming Languages Spring 2010, Spring 2013.
• CS 252r: Advanced Topics in Programming Languages Fall 2009, Spring 2011, Spring 2012.

Current projects

• CHILI:  Enabling the execution of code of unknown origin while guaranteeing that the code is not vulnerable to various classes of security attacks.
• Accrue:  Providing language-based security guarantees proportional to programmer effort.
• Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data:  Enhance technologies and policies to protect personal data used in research studies.

People

Affiliations

• Center for Research on Computation and Society
• Programming Languages at Harvard
• Systems Research at Harvard (SYRAH)

Professional activities

• CSF 2013 General chair.
• SEC@SAC14 Program Committee.
• FOOL 2013 Program Committee.
• CCS 2013 Program Committee.
• HILT 2013 Program Committee.
• Past activities:
  • CSF 2012 General chair.
  • Co-chair of APLWACA 2010 (with Ben Livshits).
  • Co-chair of PLAS 2009 (with David Naumann).
  • Program committees: SEC@SAC13, PLAS 2012, PPCloud 2011, FAST 2011, CCS 2010, CSF 2010, FCS-PrivMod 2010, WebApps '10, Bytecode 2010, ASIAN 2009, HotSec '09, FCS09, CSF 2008, PLAS 2007.

Positions available

I am looking for talented and motivated students to work with, both undergraduate and graduate. More information can be found here.

Brief bio

I completed a Ph.D. at Cornell University in August 2008, under the guidance of Andrew Myers. Prior to graduate school, I spent several years working as a consultant and contractor. I received a B.Sc.(Hons) and B.A. from Victoria University of Wellington, in Wellington, New Zealand. My wife, Kiran Gajwani, is a Lecturer/Advisor in the Economics Department at Harvard.