Android kernel vulnerabilities pose a serious threat to user security and privacy. They allow attackers to take full control over victim devices, install malicious and unwanted apps, and maintain persistent control. Unfortunately, most Android devices are never timely updated to protect their users from kernel exploits. Recent Android malware even has built-in kernel exploits to take advantage ...

We call a data structure overlaid, if a node in the structure includes links for multiple data structures and these links are intended to be used at the same time. In this paper, we present a static program analysis for overlaid data structures. Our analysis implements two main ideas. The first is to run multiple sub-analyses that track information about non-overlaid data structures, such as li...

Manufacturers of safety-critical systems must make the case that their product is sufficiently safe for public deployment. Much of this case often relies upon critical event outcomes from real-world testing, requiring manufacturers to be strategic about how they allocate testing resources in order to maximize their chances of demonstrating system safety. This work frames the partially observabl...

Hearing loss was the second-most common illness reported to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in 2009. Furthermore, between 2000 and 2010, 30% of all noise-related injury complaints reported to MSHA were for coal preparation plant employees. Previous National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) studies have shown that vibrating screens are key noise sources to ad...

The goal of this paper is to improve the type error messages in the presence of Haskell 98 type classes, in particular for the nonexpert user. As a language feature, type classes are very pervasive, and strongly influence what is reported and when, even in relatively simple programs. We propose four type class directives, and specialized type rules, to lend high-level support to compilers to im...

CIRCA is an architecture for real-time intelligent control. The CIRCA planner can generate plans that are guaranteed to maintain system safety, given certain timing constraints. To prove that its plans guarantee safety, CIRCA relies on formal verification methods. However, in many domains it is impossible to build 100% guaranteed safe plans, either because it requires more resources than availa...

We present a static program analysis for overlaid data structures such that a node in the structure includes links for multiple data structures and these links are intended to be used at the same time. These overlaid data structures are frequently used in systems code, in order to impose multiple types of indexing structures over the same set of nodes. Our analysis implements two main ideas. Th...

Proof-checking code for compliance to safety policies potentially enables a product-oriented approach to certain aspects of software certification. To date, previous research has focused on generic, low-level programming-language properties such as memory type safety. In this paper we consider proof-checking higher-level domain-specific properties for compliance to safety policies. The paper fi...

Application-level migration schemes have been paid more attention recently because of their great potential for heterogeneous migration. But they are facing an obstacle that few migration-unsafe features in certain programming languages prevent some programs from migrating. Most application-level migration schemes declare or assume they are dealing with “safe” programs which confuse users witho...

Irrespective of all the efforts made by the Department of Labour (DoL) and other relevant stakeholders to improve construction occupational health and safety (OH&S) performance, there is still a very high level of accidents and fatalities in South Africa. Injuries and accidents to workers help no community in any nation. A doctoral study was recently conducted with the aim of investigating the ...