Andrew Myers

As a PhD student under Barbara Liskov at MIT he devised the decentralized label model in 1997: every value carries a label saying who owns it and who may read it, and the owner — not a central administrator — decides when it may be declassified. In 1999 he built the model into Java as JFlow, later Jif, with information flows type-checked at compile time.

In 2003 he and Andrei Sabelfeld wrote the survey that defined the field. Later applications include the Civitas voting system (2008), written in Jif to resist vote buying and coercion, and the distributed language Fabric. Industry never really adopted the type systems, but the idea survives in every taint analysis hunting for XSS.