Systems Research Laboratory
The Systems Research Laboratory (SRL) explores a range of topics in robust and secure system tools and software. While the lab pursues a wide range of systems research, the research mission of the lab can be summed up in one question:
How do you build a system that is secure, robust, efficient, and usable?
It is somewhat distressing that after more than 60 years of experience as a field with software creation, we still don't have an answer to this question. Certainly not in the general case, and not even in many special cases. Software is something that we rely on in nearly every critical element of our daily lives. The current unreliability of software cannot continue. It is an unstable situation.
If there is a solution to this problem, we think that it is going to be found in fusing techniques from fundamental systems architecture, object-capability programming, hardcore system building, and software verification. The researchers in SRL are builders first, but system builders who are willing to dig fairly hard into theory in order to make our systems work and to know very precisely what it means for that software to work.