eBPF Grant Award for Zhendong Su and Hao Sun
The eBPF Foundation has announced Grant Awards for five eBPF academic research projects. Among them is the project titled "Lazy abstraction refinement with proof for an enhanced verifier", by Professor Zhendong Su and doctoral student Hao Sun – both from the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. Congratulations!
Zhendong Su, Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Head of the Advanced Software Technologies Lab, and doctoral student Hao Sun, receive an eBPF Foundation Grant Award for their academic research project.
About the project
The project titled "Lazy abstraction refinement with proof for an enhanced verifier" introduces a novel approach to improve the precision of the eBPF verifier. By selectively and lazily refining abstractions with higher precision verification techniques and encoding refinements in machine-checkable proofs, the approach significantly enhances the precision while maintaining a manageable complexity. Proofs generated in user space and validated in kernel space ensure minimal overhead. The implementation and thorough evaluation will demonstrate its effectiveness, with the goal of integration into the upstream and extending the adoption of eBPF.
Twenty-five proposals for technical projects were submitted by 20 universities to develop new features and improvements for eBPF. The eBPF Foundation has in total recognised five proposals with grants. The grants serve to enhance the functionality and reliability of eBPF. Furthermore, by allocating funds to educational institutions instead of hiring developers, this grant programme will offer valuable experience to students and researchers while also providing financial support to their institutions. Moreover, these funds encourage collaboration between industry and academia, contributing to the advancement of eBPF.
Hao Sun will share their early work at the upcoming external page Linux Plumbers Conference 2024, the premier event for kernel developers.
Zhendong Su is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Advanced Software Technologies Lab. Before ETH Zurich, he worked as a full professor and a Chancellor's Fellow at UC Davis. Zhendong Su is passionate about fundamental and practical innovations for building software. His research spans programming languages and compilers, software engineering, computer security, deep learning, and education technologies. He served on the steering committees of ISSTA and ESEC/FSE and as an Associate Editor for ACM TOSEM. Zhendong Su also co-chaired SAS 2009, and programme chaired ISSTA 2012 and SIGSOFT FSE 2016. He is a Member of the Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.
Hao Sun is currently a doctoral student in the Advanced Software Technologies Lab at ETH Zurich, under the supervision of Professor Zhendong Su. Prior to that, he received his Master’s degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Sun aims to propose solutions that are novel at the conceptual level and practical for real impact. The fundamental goal of his research is to improve the correctness of OS kernels (with an emphasis on Linux), one of the most complicated pieces of software, via detecting logic bugs with principled ideas and enhancing the kernel infrastructure with effective mechanisms. Recently, he has been particularly interested in the eBPF verifier, a critical component for Linux kernel security.
About the eBPF Foundation
The eBPF Foundation was established to unite a community of eBPF-related projects from across the open-source world in a neutral space. It’s backed by around a dozen members who collaborate on a shared technical vision, common terminology, security best practices, and an overall roadmap, which are then applied in different workstreams, operating system kernels and enterprise settings.