Mathias Payer wins SNSF Eccellenza Grant
Mathias Payer © 2019 EPFL/SNSF
School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) professor Mathias Payer has received an Eccellenza Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to support a research project that aims to detect and eliminate software security flaws.
Payer is a tenure-track assistant professor in IC, and head of the HexHive Lab for software systems security. He will use the grant to support a project called MultiSan, which will study methods that software developers can use to eliminate exploitable security flaws.
The project will focus especially on the development of technologies that detect errors in complex software and across system boundaries, allowing developers to eliminate them before damage can occur. Using an approach called code sanitization, Payer and his colleagues will focus on identifying security bugs in “input-reachable” code, which is any code that is exposed to potentially adversary-controlled data.
All prototypes, benchmarks, and code from the project will be released as open source. This will allow other researchers to build on the results, enable developers to guard their code, and empower end users to benefit from increased software security and data protection.
Earlier this year, Payer was also awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant to support open-source research in software security.
Eccellenza Grants
The SNSF awards competitive Eccellenza Grants annually to “highly qualified young researchers who aspire to a permanent professorship.” The goal is to support these scientists in leading projects with their own research team at a Swiss higher education institution. The grants offer project funds of up to CHF 1,500,000 over five years.