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PROF. FALK HOWAR RECEIVES AMAZON RESEARCH AWARD

Research Team Finds Security Gaps in Software Systems

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Prof. Falk Howar and his team conduct research on the analysis and protection of autonomous and safety-critical software systems.
Since 2015, Amazon has been promoting research projects from all over the world – in areas such as machine learning and IT security – with its Research Award. This year, Prof. Falk Howar from the Department of Computer Science at TU Dortmund University is receiving the award and the associated funding of 45,000 US dollars for his project titled “Scaling Dynamic Symbolic Execution for Java”. A total of 26 researchers from eleven countries were awarded in the most recent round of funding.

Prof. Howar, what is your award-winning project about?

The focus of the research I conduct with my team at TU Dortmund University is on the analysis and protection of autonomous and safety-critical software systems. We are particularly interested in the use of learning and formal methods of analyzing the behavior of these systems. The aim of our work is to test software systems for potential security gaps. In the funded project, we use automated reasoning – in other words, symbolic reasoning based on logic – which is a branch of ​artificial intelligence. A research tool called “JDart” – a framework for the dynamic, symbolic execution of Java bytecode that we’ve been developing for quite some time – forms the basis of this new project. We are now scaling the tool so that we can use it to test the security of industrial web applications.