21st Century Cryptography – Asynchronous ASIC

Prior to spinning out of Galois, engineers from Niobium Microsystems completed work on the 21st Century Cryptography DARPA project. This project developed a proof-of-concept ASIC containing high-performance, low-energy, side-channel resistant implementations of AES-256 cryptographic primitives. These implementations were developed in correct-by-construction fashion, by directly translating formal models of the cryptographic constructs into a hardware implementation […]

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2021: Year in Review

2021. Wow. There it went. And far more interesting than most of us anticipated. While weathering the various world storms, we also managed to keep advancing the cause of building trustworthy computing systems. Galois continued pioneering work in formal methods, high-assurance cryptography, machine learning, data science, rigorous digital engineering, and more. From our virtual perch, […]

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Formally Verifying the Tendermint Blockchain Protocol

  • Giuliano Losa

Distributed protocols enable components such as blockchain validator nodes, cloud servers, or IoT devices to coordinate and cooperate toward a common goal. However, in such a diverse environment, a lot of things can go wrong: hardware can fail, software can be buggy, network links can be unreliable, attackers may compromise components, and so on. Due […]

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2020: Year in Review

2020 was certainly an interesting year. Amidst a global pandemic and major societal issues,  keeping software and hardware systems trustworthy continued to be challenging. From election systems to ransomware to privacy breaches and online banking theft, the challenges of trustworthy software are alive and well. In this arena, Galois and our partners advanced the state […]

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Demo: Control SAW From Any Language

  • David Christiansen

The Software Analysis Workbench (SAW) is one of Galois’s flagship verification tools. SAW has been used to verify important, real-world cryptographic algorithms, such as AES block cipher, the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). We have used this to verify existing, widely used libraries such as libgcrypt and Bouncy Castle. […]

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Coffeebot: a tool for having hallway conversations while working remotely

  • Annie Cherkaev

Since the onset of working remotely, we’ve built a program at Galois called Coffeebot to help facilitate virtual “coffee chats” in support of maintaining our culture through spontaneous exchanges. Today we’re releasing Coffeebot, and we’re happy to share it along with simple instructions on how to set-up your own! Percolating the idea As a result […]

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Providing Safety and Verification for Learning-Enabled Cyber-Physical Systems

  • Matthew Clark

Machine learning has revolutionized cyber-physical systems (CPS) in multiple industries – in the air, on land, and in the deep sea.  And yet, verifying and assuring the safety of advanced machine learning is difficult because of the following reasons:  State-Space Explosion: Autonomous systems are characteristically adaptive, intelligent, and/or may incorporate learning capabilities.  Unpredictable Environments: The […]

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Creating an Assurance Model for Secure Embedded Systems

In 2019, Galois and its spinout Tangram Flex were awarded a $5 million contract for the DARPA I2O Cyber Assured Systems Engineering (CASE) program. We wanted to present an update for the project’s progress.  Introducing Cyber-Assured Plugins to embedded computer systems “The problem is not in our stars … but in ourselves,” is a paraphrase […]

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Public Tech Talk: “What is an EUTxO blockchain?”

The slides can be downloaded here. Abstract: The UTxO (unspent transaction output) model is the underlying data structure of Bitcoin, which has since been extended to the Extended UTxO model. It exists in code, but what does it mean?  I will give a novel mathematical model based on some strikingly simple type equations which — for […]

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