I have moved to Microsoft Research. I have also started to maintain a personal blog. This page remains as an archive.
Nikhil Swamy
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland
College Park, MD
nik


I am a member of the programming languages group and am advised by Dr. Michael Hicks. My research is focused primarily on provably securing software systems by utilizing formal methods in the design, implementation or analysis of programming languages.

I expect to graduate this summer. In the fall, I will begin work as a researcher at Microsoft Research, in Redmond, WA.
A list of my publications is available here and my resume is here.


Research projects


Most recently, I've been working on web security.

SELinks: End-to-end Security for Web Applications
    My dissertation work has focused on developing techniques for making web applications secure by construction. I've applied ideas from type theory (mainly dependent types) to design a programming language called SELinks in which fine-grained security policies can be reliably enforced. We've built a couple of realistic web applications using this language. More information can be found here.

 
Defeating XSS attacks
    The whole purpose of sites like Blogger, MySpace, and Flickr is to republish content provided by their users. If this content contains scripts, then the script will be executed in the browser of anyone who visits the site. This is a script injection attack, and it is currently the #1 class of security vulnerabilities being reported today. We propose BEEP, a solution in which web site developers can equip their web pages with policies that allow a browser to filter out all malicious content. More information can be found here.

 
Verification of cryptographic protocols
    Windows Vista now ships with a system called CardSpace that manages digital identity in a user's interaction with a web service. This paper describes a technique to verify that implementations of tricky multi-party cryptographic protocols (like those used in CardSpace) provide the necessary guarantees of secrecy and authenticity.  


I have also worked on a number of other projects that address various aspects of software quality.

Dynamic Information Flow Security
    Managing Policy Updates in Security-Typed Languages
N. Swamy, M. Hicks, S. Tse and S. Zdancewic
In Proc. IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, 2006
Memory Management
    Safe Manual Memory Management in Cyclone
N. Swamy, M. Hicks, G. Morrisett, D. Grossman and T. Jim
Science of Computer Programming, Special Issue on Memory Management
Race Detection
    Dynamic Inference of Polymorphic Lock Types
J. Rose, N. Swamy and M. Hicks
Science of Computer Programming, Special Issue on Concurrency and Synchronization in Java programs
Performance Analysis
    Finding and Removing Performance Bottlenecks in Large Systems
G. Ammons, J. Choi, M. Gupta and N. Swamy
In Proceedings of European Conference on Object Oriented Programming (ECOOP) 2004


In the past, I did some work on quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
The best thing to emerge from this work is my Erdös number which is now no greater than 3. (Barnum -> Saks -> Erdös)
Just kidding ... AI is awesome and I'm pretty proud of this old work as well.

    RGL Study in Hybrid Real-Time Systems
K. Hennacy, N. Swamy and D. Perlis
Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence, 2004
    Finding a Better-than-Classical Quantum AND/OR Algorithm
L. Spector, H. Barnum, H.J. Bernstein and N. Swamy
Congress of Evolutionary Computation, 1999
    Quantum computing applications of genetic programming
L. Spector, H. Barnum, H.J. Bernstein and N. Swamy
Advances in Genetic Programming, MIT Press, 2000
    Quantum Computing and AI
An overview of this project from L.Spector's invited talk at AAAI '99