Tech Talk: Wyvern - Security by Design

Join us for a talk with Professor Alex Potanin from Victoria University of Wellington (NZ). He will be talking about Wyvern, a programming language designed with security in mind.

Abstract:

The engineering properties of programs derive from their design. As programs grow in scale and complexity, ensuring compliance with the overall design intent becomes more critical yet also more difficult. The goal of the Wyvern programming language is to help programmers cleanly express and enforce design as an integral part of programming. Wyvern accomplishes this with a capability-safe object model that expresses design constraints constructively, a strong system of types and effects to enforce abstractions at both component and object scales, and an extensible syntax that can express designs in a variety of domains while preserving important security and modularity properties. The talk will flesh out these design goals and demonstrate how the features of the language support them, while highlighting some research directions that have arisen from the language's goals.

Speaker Bio:

Alex Potanin - Associate Professor, Victoria University of Wellington.

Alex works on type systems for object-oriented programming languages. In the past he developed generic ownership and immutability showing how to provide object graph encapsulation and mutability guarantees while utilising type polymorphism and other advanced type checking features. He also worked on empirical studies on Java memory usage and collections designs including showing that incoming and outgoing references for object graphs form power law relations. Since 2013 he was co-leading a Wyvern Programming Language project together with Professor Jonathan Aldrich at Carnegie Mellon University (http://wyvernlang.github.io) - a novel object-based language for the web and IoT programming prioritising security considerations above all else during every language design and development decision. Alex is on sabbatical at Kyoto University (with Atsushi Igarashi) between December 2019 and March 2020.

See his profile here: https://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/Main/AlexPotanin

Practical Details:

The talk will be in English and is open to anyone with an interest in the topic, but due to space limitations we can only accommodate a maximum of 40 participants. So please RSVP in advance (and un-RSVP if you end up not being able to make it). Further details for access into the building will be sent to you after you RSVP.

Beer and soft drinks will be provided.