[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
11:45am-1:30pm
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)

Interface Safety in Multilingual Software
Gang Tan
Boston College

Most real-world software systems consist of software components
developed in different programming languages.  For example, Sun's Java
Development Kit 1.6 (JDK) contains around 2 million lines of Java code
as well as 800,000 lines of C/C++ code.  Unfortunately, the interface
code that glues multilingual software components is a constant source
of software bugs and vulnerabilities.  This is demonstrated by our
empirical security study of JDK 1.6, which identified O(100) bugs in
the interface code between Java and C components.

We propose two novel frameworks that shed light on how to achieve
interface safety in multilingual software.  The first system, SafeJNI,
follows the principle of language-based isolation to ensure C code
respects Java's invariants. The second system, ILEA, is a general
framework for performing analysis across programming-language
boundaries.  By automatically extracting an approximate Java
specification from C code, ILEA enables existing Java analyses to
cover foreign C code.

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Upcoming Events:

# Wed 3/5  no seminar: spring break
# Wed 3/19 no seminar
# Wed 4/16 Nikolaos Papaspyrou: Continuations for Prototyping
  Concurrent Languages 

We are otherwise open.  Come give a talk!

--Mitch