Co-developer of Nozzle and Zozzle, programs that detect and protect browsers against JavaScript-based malware, Zorn has also led the Software Design and Implementation Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington, as part of the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group.
After receiving an MS (1984) and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989, Zorn served eight years on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder, receiving tenure, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996. He left the University of Colorado in 1998 to join Microsoft Research as a Senior Researcher.
His research interests include programming language design and implementation and performance measurement and analysis. Zorn has also served as an Associate Editor of the ACM journal Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and the ACM journal Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. He has been a member of the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee and has served as the Program Chair (1999) and General Chair (2010) of PLDI.
Among the projects in which he has been involved are Nozzle and Zozzle, developed with Ben Livshits (MSR) and Paruj Ratanaworabhan (Cornell University). These programs detect and protect browsers against JavaScript-based malware. Nozzle is a runtime monitoring infrastructure that detects attempts by attackers to spray the heap, and Zozzle is a low-overhead solution for detecting and preventing JavaScript malware that is fast enough to be deployed in the browser.
Publications Zorn co-authored include the following works: "Zozzle: Fast and Precise In-Browser JavaScript Malware Detection," Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, August 2011, with Charles Curtsinger, Benjamin Livshits, and Christian Seifert; "Modular Protections Against Non-control Data Attacks," 24th IEEE Computer Society Foundations Symposium (CSF 2011), June 2011, with Cole Schlesinger, Karthik Pattabiraman, Nikhil Swamy, and David Walker; and "Flikker: Saving DRAM Refresh-power through Critical Data Partitioning," Sixteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 11), March 2011, with Song Liu, Karthik Pattabiraman, and Thomas Moscibroda.
