Indian American Georgia Tech professor, team awarded $7.5 million from the Office of Naval Research

February 9, 2018

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Georgia Tech professor, Indian American Santosh Pande, is a part of a team of researchers from the campus’ School of Computer Science who has been awarded $7.5 million from the Office of Naval Research to develop a customized attack-resistant software stack, according to a press release.

According to a press release, the team is developing a technique for reducing what’s known as “the attack surface,” or the total number of ways in which a program can become vulnerable to being exploited and Pande’s work on the team will focus on compilers to help determine what essential code must be loaded for each user during software execution.

Most general-purpose software includes code that not every user needs and unused code can create an opportunity for exploitation by attackers, thus through this research, users will be able to run software in which unneeded code is removed, thus decreasing the vulnerability of the programs they use, according to a press release.

According to Georgia Tech’s website, Pande’s primary interest is investigating static and dynamic compiler optimizations on evolving architectures and his research philosophy involves tackling practical problems which are relevant and important to the current issues in systems research and propose foundational solutions to them for good impact.

Pande has published more than 40 papers in journals and conferences which include ACM Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), IEEE Real Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC) and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) and has also done extensive compiler development and is a part of SUIF collaborative program amongst universities, according to Georgia Tech’s website.

According to Georgia Tech’s website, Pande served as a co-guest editor for the special issue of Journal of Parallel and Distributed Systems on `Compilation Techniques for Distributed Memory Systems’ published in December 1996 and also for the special issue of the Parallel Processing Letters journal on `Challenges in Compiler Optimizations for Scalable Parallel Systems’ published in December 1997.

He has also served on program committees of many conferences and has co-chaired ACM LCTES ’01 as well as an IEEE Distinguished Visitor from 1996 to 2000, according to Georgia Tech’s website.