J.D. Tygar's research interests focus on computer security. He was the co-designer and implementor of ITOSS, the Integrated toolkit for Operating System Security, and has designed and implemented a number of new security techniques and algorithms. He is currently developing techniques for realizing "self-securing programs", programs which are able to run securely and efficiently in environments which provide only minimal security support. He is conducting the following research: -To develop a family of randomized algorithms sufficient for implementing self-securing programs. -To build a library of software routines which allow software engineers to transparently implement self-securing support for their application programs. -To demonstrate the utility of these ideas by implementing them cleanly on the Camelot transaction processing system running under the Mach operating system. -To document, test, and distribute the code developed as a result of this implementation. He is also interested in visual programming of security constraints and in the inventing of algorithmic techniques for detecting security flaws in running operating systems.
