RNDr. Martin Ukrop
Current aim of my research
“I want help developers create more usable security APIs to lower software exploitation.”
My research
My current research is about making security usable for IT professionals (developers, system administrators and such) that lack a specialized training in computer security. I focus on cryptographic interfaces (both programmable and command-line) of developer tools and software libraries. Currently, the emphasis is placed on X.509-capable libraries, such as OpenSSL, GnuTLS and NSS, paying special attention to the process of certificate creation and validation.
Before coming to usable security I was interested in randomness testing and helped develop the EACirc project, the automatic problem solver based on circuit-like representation and genetic programming.
I'm a Ph.D. candidate supervised by Vashek Matyas. My research efforts are supported by Red Hat Czech and co-supervised by Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos. Furthermore, we cooperate with psychologists from IRTIS.
Teaching and supervision
I see deep meaning and responsibility in teaching and have been tutoring seminars and lecturing a few courses for more than 5 years. I participate in some security courses (Secure coding principles and practices and Laboratory of security and applied cryptography) as well as courses on functional programming (Haskell) (Non-Imperative Programming and Seminar on Functional Programming). I have supervised multiple bachelor theses in the fields of computer security, functional programming and programming education.
More importantly, I am much engaged in the local community of student teachers called Teaching lab aiming to improve the courses and skills of teachers at the faculty and elsewhere. We run a course for student starting to teach (Teaching Lab course). We've designed a Teacher's reflective diary to help teachers improve their skills by reflection.
Other activities
I'm an avid member of the the organization for experiential learning called Instruktoři Brno aiming to inspire people, broaden their experience and lead them to self-improvement.
I co-organize(d) multiple activities bringing enthusiasm for informatics natural sciences to secondary-school students. This includes the online programming puzzle hunt InterLoS or the multidosciplinary event InterSoB. These activities are covered by the Friends of the nordic animals association (a student club at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University).