ITU researcher receives grant for project on verification of reflective programs
Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Eduard Kamburjan, has received a Sapere Aude grant of almost DKK 6.2 million from Independent Research Fund Denmark. The grant will fund a project that will investigate how to verify reflective programs.
Written 24 June, 2025 07:22 by Mette Strange Mortensen
When programming modern software, one of the big challenges is reflection. It is a technique that makes it possible for the program to investigate and change its own structure during execution, and is used in critical libraries and numerous smartphone app. While it can be a powerful and useful tool, it can also present severe security risks. Assistant Professor Eduard Kamburjan has now received a Sapere Aude grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark of almost DKK 6.2 million to investigate reflection and develop new methods and tools that can verify reflective programs and make sure they are reliable.
“My work generally revolves around software quality and developer support. For this new project, we are going to look at reflection, which is widely used but rarely supported by developer tools. One of the reasons that reflection is so rarely supported is, that it is theoretically very hard to describe full reflection, so we are first step is going to look at what fragments of reflection is actually used.” says Eduard Kamburjan, “We will then develop a library and verification tool using ideas from knowledge graphs where tools and logics for similar problems exist.”
Reflection is not often prioritised in both research and development, but the assumption of Eduard Kamburjan and his team is that better tools for verification will improve both developer experience, project reliability and software security.
“If reflection is used the wrong way it can open up massive security holes. By improving verification, we believe we can minimise the risks,” says Eduard Kamburjan, “I also hope this will improve the developers’ experience and project management. Reflection is one of those things that is ridiculously hard to get right. When I give talks about reflection and ask how many people use it, quite a few people raise their hands. But when asked whether they enjoy it, all hands go down.”
The project is entitled “Graph-based Verification of Reflective Programs”. The grant is a Sapere Aude Research Leader Grant, which is granted to young, talented researchers, who are about to start their own research group.
Theis Duelund Jensen, Press Officer, phone +45 2555 0447, email