R. Sekar's main research focus is on software and systems security. It is driven by practical problems, and emphasizes building real systems. It draws on principles and techniques from programming languages and compilers, operating systems, algorithms, networks, and artificial intelligence to address problems such as:

• Software vulnerability mitigation (buffer overflows, SQL injection, XSS, ...)
• Malware and untrusted code defense
• High-performance intrusion detection (network and host-based)
• Attack isolation and recovery
• Self-healing and self-regenerative systems
• Monitoring and management of distributed systems