The researchers Musard Balliu from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Marco Guarnieri from the IMDEA Software Institute have won a 2021 Privacy-Enhancing Technologies RFP Facebook Research award for their project “InferViz: Weighted inference and visualization of insecure code paths” worth $100,000.

The winners of the ‘2021 Privacy Enhancing Technologies request for proposals’ (whose deadline was April 12) have been recently announced. This research award opportunity attracted 159 proposals from 102 universities and ended with ten award recipients.

With this contest, Facebook’s goal is to help design and deploy new privacy-enhancing solutions that minimize the data they collect, process, and externally share across their products, and to provide better tools to control, measure, and mitigate privacy risks.

The project presented by Musard and Marco will focus on designing tools that enable programmers to automatically detect, evaluate, and visualize violations of security and privacy policies in programs. For this, the researchers will develop techniques and tool support for (1) inferring program-level dependencies from code, (2) checking security policies against these dependencies, and (3) helping developers visualize insecure flows violating the policy.

Marco, talking in relation to the award obtained, said: “We are both really happy and excited to start working on this project. We are looking forward to collaborate with Facebook’s researchers and to build on top of Facebook’s Infer program analysis tool.”

More information at Facebook’s Research Blog: https://research.fb.com/blog/2021/07/investing-in-academic-research-to-improve-our-privacy-technology-our-approach-and-recent-rfp-winners/