Michael Franz

Michael Franz

Photo of Professor Michael Franz
Born Hamburg, Germany
Alma mater ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Thesis Code Generation On-The-Fly -- A Key to Portable Software
Doctoral advisor Niklaus Wirth
Known for early research on just-in-time compilation and optimization; co-inventor of trace-tree compilation; artificial software diversity
Notable awards ACM Fellow (2015); IEEE Fellow (2015); IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2012)
Website
http://www.michaelfranz.com

Michael Franz is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on just-in-time compilation and optimization[1] and on artificial software diversity.[2] He is a Chancellor's Professor[3] of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (by courtesy) in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UCI, and Director of UCI's Secure Systems and Software Laboratory.[4][5]

He is a Fellow of the ACM,[6] a Fellow of IEEE,[7][8] and a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Achievement Award.[1] He has graduated 25 Ph.D.s. as primary advisor, published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles, and holds 5 U.S. Patents. He is also a co-founder of Immunant, Inc., a start-up company specializing in software security.

Biography

Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, Franz attended the Christianeum in Hamburg and the Gordonstoun School in Elgin, Scotland and eventually graduated from the Christianeum with an accelerated high school diploma ("vorgezogenes Abitur") ahead of the rest of his class.

After completing military service in Germany, Franz moved to Switzerland to begin studies of computer science at ETH Zurich, finishing his Diplom-Ingenieur degree in 1989. During his undergraduate years, he was President of ETH's Computer Science Students Association.[9]

Declining a Full Fulbright Scholarship that would have funded doctoral studies in the United States, he stayed at ETH and began doctoral studies under the supervision of Turing Award Winner Niklaus Wirth, completing his Doctor of Technical Sciences degree in 1994.

Following two further years at ETH Zurich as a Senior Research Associate and Lecturer, he joined the University of California, Irvine as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in January 1996. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and Full Professor in 2006. Since 2007, he has held a second appointment in UCI's School of Engineering, as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (by courtesy). In 2016, he was awarded the title Chancellor's Professor.[4][5][3]

Research

Franz is well known for pioneering and advancing several research ideas that were quite unconventional when he proposed them and that now seem almost obvious in hindsight.

His doctoral dissertation, entitled "Code Generation On-The-Fly: A Key To Portable Software"[10] proposed to make software portable among different target computer architectures by way of using on-the-fly compilation from a compressed intermediate data structure at load time. Two years later, the Java programming language and system were launched and took this idea mainstream, albeit using the term "just-in-time compilation" instead of the term "on-the-fly compilation" that Franz had used.

Franz was also one of the first academics to realize that JavaScript was going to be huge. At a time when most of the academic community was ignoring JavaScript and similar dynamic languages as “little scripting languages,” Franz and his student Andreas Gal researched how one would best tackle the specific features of a dynamically typed language in a just-in-time compiler. The resulting technique, Trace Tree Compilation, is now covered by a U.S. Patent.[11] Franz took this idea to Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript and Mozilla's CTO at the time, and a collaborative project between UCI and Mozilla was born that eventually culminated in the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox.[12]

More recently, Franz has been one of the main drivers of the "Moving Target Defense" movement for cyber security. He has been pioneering compiler-generated software diversity as a defense mechanism against software attacks, inspired by biodiversity in nature. Imagine an "App Store" containing a diversification engine (a "multicompiler") that automatically generates a unique version of every program for every user. All the different versions of the same program behave in exactly the same way from the perspective of the end-user, but they implement their functionality in subtly different ways. As a result, any specific attack will succeed only on a small fraction of targets. An attacker would require a large number of different attacks and would have no way of knowing a priori which specific attack will succeed on which specific target. Equally importantly, this approach makes it much more difficult for an attacker to generate attack vectors by way of reverse engineering of security patches.

This project has attracted attention beyond academia, with coverage in the popular press ranging from as far as The Economist[2] to Wired Magazine.[13] Franz and some of his students hold a U.S. Patent on some of the underlying ideas.[14]

References

  1. 1 2 "IEEE Computer Society 2012 Technical Achievement Award".
  2. 1 2 "Divided we stand". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
  3. 1 2 "UCI Chancellor's Professors". www.ap.uci.edu/distinctions/chancprof.html. Retrieved 2016-06-01.
  4. 1 2 "Home Page of Professor Michael Franz, University of California, Irvine". www.ics.uci.edu. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
  5. 1 2 "Home Page of Professor Michael Franz, University of California, Irvine". www.michaelfranz.com. Retrieved 2016-01-11.
  6. ↑ "Michael S. Franz - Award Winner". awards.acm.org. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
  7. ↑ "IEEE 2016 Newly Elevated Fellows" (PDF).
  8. ↑ "ACM Fellows Named for Computing Innovations that Are Advancing Technology in the Digital Age—Association for Computing Machinery". www.acm.org. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
  9. ↑ "Hall of Fame - Verein der Informatik Studierenden der ETH Zürich". www.vis.ethz.ch. Retrieved 2016-01-11.
  10. ↑ Franz, Michael (1994-03-01). Code-Generation On-the-Fly: A Key to Portable Software. Zürich: Verlag der Fachvereine Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH Zurich. ISBN 9783728121158.
  11. ↑ Dynamic incremental compiler and method, retrieved 2016-01-11
  12. ↑ "JavaScript:TraceMonkey - MozillaWiki". wiki.mozilla.org. Retrieved 2016-01-11.
  13. ↑ "Software Clones: Genetic Variation and Technology". WIRED. Retrieved 2016-01-11.
  14. ↑ Multi-variant parallel program execution to detect malicious code injection, retrieved 2016-01-11
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