I am a member of the Security Research Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.

I am interested in security and distributed systems, and in particular, logics for authorization. Recent research has focussed on authorization policies for community-wide Electronic Health Records (EHR), the design and implementation of SecPAL (Security Policy Assertion Language), policy analysis foundations and tools, and usability of authorization languages. I graduated with a Computer Science degree from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where I also did my PhD. For my PhD, I designed Cassandra, a language for specifying and enforcing expressive authorization policies, and conducted a large-scale case study on a policy for the EHR project in the UK (NPfIT).

Interested in an internship at MSR?

Microsoft Research Ltd.
7 J J Thomson Avenue
Cambridge CB3 0FB
United Kingdom

Email: moritzbXmicrosoft.com, where X=@

• The Role of Abduction in Declarative Authorization Policies. Moritz Y. Becker and Sebastian Nanz. In 10th International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL), 2008.
• A Logic for State-Modifying Authorization Policies (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker and Sebastian Nanz. In 12th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), LNCS 4734, 203-218, 2007
• Design and Semantics of a Decentralized Authorization Language (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker, Cedric Fournet and Andrew D. Gordon. In 20th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), 3--15, 2007
• A Logic for State-Modifying Authorization Policies (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker and Sebastian Nanz. Technical Report MSR-TR-2007-32, Microsoft Research. 2007.
• Information Governance in NHS's NPfIT: A Case for Policy Specification (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker. International Journal of Medical Informatics (IJMI), Volume 76, Issue 5-6, 2007.
• SecPAL: Design and Semantics of a Decentralized Authorization Language (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker, Cedric Fournet and Andrew D. Gordon. Technical Report MSR-TR-2006-120, Microsoft Research. 2006.
• Cassandra: Flexible Trust Management and its Application to Electronic Health Records. Ph.D. thesis. (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker. Published as Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR 648, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, 214pp. October 2005.
• A formal security policy for an NHS electronic health record service (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker. Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR 628, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, 81pp. March 2005.
• Cassandra: flexible trust management, applied to electronic health records (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker and Peter Sewell. In 17th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop (CSFW), 139--154, 2004.
• Cassandra: distributed access control policies with tunable expressiveness (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker and Peter Sewell. In 5th IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (POLICY), 159--168, 2004.
• A graph layout algorithm for drawing metabolic pathways (.pdf). Moritz Y. Becker and Isabel Rojas. Bioinformatics 17(5): 461-467, Oxford University Press, 2001. Also in IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics, 625--631, 2003.