Padmanabhan Krishnan

Padmanabhan co-developed Macaron’s approach to checking the integrity of software builds and dependencies. Available to engineering teams and open-source maintainers, the framework checks evidence of how software was produced and whether delivery processes resist tampering. The contribution matters because software quality depends not only on inspected source code, but also on confidence in the software actually deployed.

Padmanabhan Krishnan is Research Director at Oracle Labs in Brisbane, Australia, focusing on program analysis, vulnerability detection and automated testing. Investigations examine how software behaves, where security weaknesses emerge and how verification can be automated, alongside runtime protection and the security of complex application infrastructure.

Padmanabhan co-developed Macaron’s logic-based approach to verifying that software and underlying dependencies are built securely. The framework analyses build provenance and assesses whether build and deployment pipelines resist tampering, directly tackling scenarios where published software diverges from inspected source code.

Released as an open-source tool, Macaron enables the engineering community to inspect and strengthen build processes. Evaluations across Java, Python and npm ecosystems highlighted widespread gaps in build records and transparency, providing practitioners with automatable checks to establish trust in deployed software.