Pasquale Malacaria, Reader in Computer Science,
School of Electronic Engineering
and Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS
+44 020 7 8825231
pm@eecs.qmul.ac.uk
Research interest:
Information Theory, Security, Verification, Game Theory.
News:
I will be at ETAPS 2013 in Rome. Friday the 22nd will be a very special ETAPS day.
In the morning there will be the Bohm Fest celebrating Corrado Bohm 90th year. He was my master supervisor and
I look forward to this celebration. In the afternoon there will be a special session for our colleague and friend Kohei Honda who
sadly passed away last December; I will give a talk/tribute about his work on Game Semantics.
It will be a very special day.
Jonathan has a very nice development to bitcoin mining of the techniques we introduced in the ACSAC paper.
Read about it here.
Paper accepted at VMCAI 2013 . The paper is about leakage analysis of Markovian processes
with application to randomized protocols.
The paper "The Thermodynamics of Confidentiality" has been accepted for the 25th IEEE
Computer Security Foundations Symposium . The overall contribution of this paper can be seen as laying down in a precise sense the thermodynamic foundations of confidentiality.
In a follow up paper ("Thermodynamic Aspects of Confidentiality" to appear in
Information and Computation) we extend this work to side channel analysis of Brownian Computers.
We found out that there are timing channels in Brownian Computers that don't exist in ordinary computers. Can you guess what they are?
Current work: quantitative analysis of leakage of real code, e.g. quantifying leakage of confidential information in the
Linux Kernel. The paper ( ACSAC 2010 ) is here .
Also current interests include game theoretical analysis for security risk assessment.
Recent work: ( PLAS 2008 ,
ASIACCS 2009) addresses the
problem of maximal leakage of secure information, translating it into the information theoretical problem
of channel capacity. The problem is then approached using
Lagrange multipliers.
We also use Lagrange Multipliers to compute loss of anonymity in anonymity protocols
( ASIACCS 2009 ).
10th International School on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication and Software Systems:
Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages. Bertinoro 2010
principal investigator in the EPSRC project "Games and Abstraction: The Science of Cyber Security"
principal investigator in the EPSRC project "Quantitative Information Flow"
principal investigator in the EPSRC project "Model Checking and Program Analysis for Quantifying Interference".
co-investigator in the EPSRC platform grant "Extreme Reasoning".
Interested in a PhD? Funding available, further details
click here.
Applicants should be able to show some knowledge and interest in my areas of research.
Also interested in applications of information theory to
machine learning in particular
Adaboost. Adaboost significantly boosts the performance of
classifiers, which are algorithms that
allow to classify new cases based on previous cases. An example could be a
program which classify if a patient has/has not cancer given the symptoms based on a database of previous cases
(this database is called the training set).
In this paper we related Adaboost with Kelly's theory of optimal betting and by
doing so we significantly simplify the Adaboost algorithm.
Past works: Game Semantics and its algorithmic applications.
Game semantics provides a very fine graded analysis of computation. It has been used to successfully answer some open questions in the semantic of programming languages (Full abstraction for PCF, see publication sections).
Here are some motivations for that work.
Corrado Bohm supervised my master thesis on second order lambda calculus. Another remarkable scientist,
Jean-Yves Girard supervised my PhD on Stone duality.
