The Secure Software and Systems Laboratory at UC Irvine conducts research that focuses on software techniques for making computers more reliable, and on implementation techniques for increasing software performance. Often, the two are related: increased reliability comes at a performance cost, but then new optimization techniques may be able to reduce this overhead so that the net performance effect of increased reliability is brought back down (sometimes close to zero).
Our work has had significant real-world impact. Our research on just-in-time compilation contributed significantly to the success of the service computing paradigm, leading to browser-based applications such as Gmail that behave not much differently from traditional native applications that a user would purchase and install locally on their computer ahead of first use. Our patented invention of Trace Tree compilation was transitioned into the Firefox web browser in a collaborative project between the lab an
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