His research funding comes from organizations such as DARPA, NSF, Qualcomm, Oracle and Mozilla.

This year alone, Computer Science Professor Michael Franz has accumulated over $3.9 million in research funding from prestigious organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), Qualcomm, Oracle and Mozilla. This follows his trend of more than $1 million per year on average in research expenditures.

Franz currently runs two projects funded by DARPA’s Cyber Fault-Tolerant Attack Recovery (CFAR) Program, for which he received nearly $2 million and roughly $700,000 in May, respectively. The CFAR Program aims to “produce revolutionary breakthroughs in defensive cyber techniques that can be deployed to protect existing and planned software systems in both military and civilian contexts without requiring changes to the concept of operations of these systems,” according to a statement by program manager John Everett.

Franz also runs a project funded by DARPA’s Vetting Commodity IT Software and Firmware Program (VET), which addresses “the threat of hidden malicious functionality in COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) IT devices … including mobile phones, printers, computer workstations and many other everyday items,” according to a statement by program manager Timothy Fraser. He received nearly $65,000 for this project.

Finally, in July, Franz received nearly $620,000 from the NSF for a collaborative project titled “ENCORE—ENhanced program protection through COmpiler-REwriter cooperation.” According to the abstract, the project will produce “a prototype implementation consisting of a producer-side metadata derivation engine, and a consumer-side binary rewriting engine using this metadata to safely perform binary code manipulation.” In the past year, Franz has also received unrestricted gifts from Qualcomm, Oracle and Mozilla totaling $263,000.