Alok Menghrajani
Currently: security consulting and lecturer.
Previously: security engineering at Square Block. Co-author of Hack (the programming language) and put the 's' in https at Facebook Meta. Maker of various CTF puzzles.
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Max, Scott and I worked on taint support for PHP.
The idea is to detect & prevent security bugs such as SQL injections, shell injection, XSS, etc.
Taint support implies keeping track of which strings are controlled externally. The main implementation difficulty is making sure that the taint related code does not spread through the entire compiler. Max came up with a clever design involving a TaintObserver object.
Unfortunately, tracking taint currently implies a big performance loss and cannot be enabled site-wide.
Checkout http://www.jsflow.net/jsflow-challenge.html for similar work and if you want to play with a JavaScript challenge.