Hello! I'm a graduate computer science researcher in the PhD program at UC San Diego, working on programming systems and security. 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; and at Brave, building new systems for web privacy protection, program analysis, and browser engine instrumentation. I've also contributed to LiquidHaskell and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.

Email: mds009@eng.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.

Personal: SmartDry Lives!

Reviving a dead IoT laundry sensor by hacking the firmware and reimplementing its cloud backend.

Fun Projects:

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

Publications:

• PriSC 2023: 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: 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