Jana Hofmann
I am a tenure-track faculty member at MPI-SP and lead the group for Foundations of Information Security and Trust. Before joining MPI-SP, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Azure Research, Microsoft. I obtained my PhD from Saarland University while working at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security.
I develop techniques that increase trust in security-critical systems by generating strong guarantees based on formal reasoning. In particular, I am interested in information security on shared devices like cloud servers. My goal is to:
- Describe existing information flow.
- Detect unexpected information flow.
- Prevent undesired information flow.
My recent work focuses on information leakage through microarchitectural side channels. To establish strong security guarantees in large (possibly black-box) systems, I combine techniques from formal methods and programming languages with systems and testing approaches. For example, I develop formal leakage models that can be used to systematically search for information leaks in hardware and software. In another line of work, I investigate how to eliminate side channels with software-based partitioning techniques.