Willard Rafnsson

Associate Professor
IT University of Copenhagen

Research Interests

My goal is to enable developers to write, at scale, trustworthy software that satisfies high-level security requirements.

My research is on language-based security. I build foundations for computer security by advancing and applying techniques and tools from programming-language theory and formal methods, such as program analysis and program transformation.

Bio

I am an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU). I am a member of the Center for Information Security and Trust (CISAT) , as well as the Programming, Logic and Semantics (PLS) and Software Quality Research (SQUARE) groups.

I was a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the School of Computer Science in the summer of 2022, hosted by Stephanie Balzer.

I was a Postdoc at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), hosted by Deepak Garg, and at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) CyLab, hosted by Limin Jia and Lujo Bauer. I did my PhD at Chalmers in the security lab, supervised by Andrei Sabelfeld.

Projects

My projects, in reverse-chronological order:

Publications

My publications, in reverse-chronological order:

Service

I serve on program committees. I have served on the following events.

I regularly peer-review research papers for CCS, S&P, CSF, NDSS, USENIX Security, ESORICS, POST, NordSec, FCS, MMM-ACNS, TOPLAS, and JLAMP.

Outreach

I appear in public media:

I create material for a free online learning course on cybersecurity, SikkerCyber, aimed at employees in small- and medium-sized enterprises. (funded by Industriens Fond). I am the creator of the offensive security module.

Teaching

I teach at the IT University of Copenhagen. Samples: 1, 2, 3.

Current

Past

I created courses on Introductory Programming , Information Theory , and Functional Programming, have been course manager of an Algorithms course, and been TA in Cryptography, Concurrent Programming, Testing & Verification, Computability & Complexity, Formal Languages & Automata, Discrete Mathematics, Computer Organization, and Object-Oriented Programming.

I am appointed external examiner ("censor"), by the Danish Ministry for Education and Research ("Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet"), in the following censor corps:

Supervision

I supervise student research- and thesis-projects.

I only supervise projects which I am highly enthusiastic about, and which will likely lead to a research paper. Are you a student interested in writing a project with me? Make sure my research agenda overlaps with your interest, then set up a meet.

Current Supervision

Past Supervision

 

Contact

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