Michael Smith — spinda.net

Hello! I'm a graduate computer science researcher in the PhD program at UC San Diego, working on programming systems and security. I also wear a lot of hats at FlexWash, building industrial automation, managed networking, and IoT/edge computing for the underserved car wash industry.

I've previously interned at:

Mozilla, contributing to Firefox's JavaScript engine/JIT, headless mode, and remote debugging protocols, as well as Rust and Servo;
Brave Research, building new systems for web privacy protection, program analysis, and browser engine instrumentation; and
AWS Automated Reasoning, contributing to Cedar and working on distributed systems and graph algorithms.

I've also contributed to LiquidHaskell, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and Rust's futures library.

Email: mds009@ucsd.edu
GitHub: @spinda

Currently Working On:

Research: Cachet (GitHub): Static checking for secure just-in-time compilers, using Rust, Corral, Boogie, and Z3! Designing a language for building secure compilers, and using it to verify a fork of Firefox's JavaScript JIT.

Fun Projects:

ML: Who needs a backend? ChatGPT as the universal Redux reducer

Publications:

PriSC 2023: [WIP] Cachet: A Domain-Specific Language for Trustworthy Just-In-Time Compilers (PDF)
Michael Smith, Abhishek Sharma, John Renner, David Thien, Sorin Lerner, Fraser Brown, Hovav Shacham, Deian Stefan
PriSC 2023: [WIP] FaJITa: Verifying Optimizations on Just-In-Time Programs (PDF)
David Thien, Michael Smith, Evan Johnson, Sorin Lerner, Hovav Shacham, Deian Stefan, Fraser Brown
PETS 2022: Blocked or Broken? Automatically Detecting When Privacy Interventions Break Websites (PDF)
Michael Smith, Peter Snyder, Moritz Haller, Benjamin Livshits, Deian Stefan, Hamed Haddadi
ACM CCS 2021: SugarCoat: Programmatically Generating Privacy-Preserving, Web-Compatible Resource Replacements for Content Blocking (PDF)
Michael Smith, Pete Snyder, Benjamin Livshits, Deian Stefan
USENIX WOOT 2018: Browser history re:visited (PDF)
Michael Smith, Craig Disselkoen, Shravan Narayan, Fraser Brown, Deian Stefan

News coverage: Vice, The Register, Naked Security , SlashGear, gHacks