by Eric Seidel, Galois intern Embedded DSLs are a bit of a double-edged sword. They have a low start-up cost because you can defer a lot of work to the host language, but producing good error messages can be challenging. People often talk about the quality of type errors produced by the host language, but […]

by Brent Carmer and David W. Archer, PhD Our team at Galois, Inc. is interested in making secure computation practical. Much of our secure computation work has focused on linear secret sharing (LSS, a form of multi-party computation) and the platform we’ve built on that technology. However, we’ve also done a fair bit of comparison […]

abstract: Read-copy update (RCU) is a synchronization mechanism that is sometimes used as an alternative to reader-writer locking (among other things) that was added to the Linux kernel in 2002. A similar mechanism was added to Sequent’s DYNIX/ptx parallel UNIX kernel in 1993, and antecedents go back to at least 1980. Although a fully functional […]

During the first week of October, Galois held “Innovation Week,” a time for everybody to explore new ideas, recharge our creativity, have fun and share what we’ve learned and done with each other. Throughout the week, Galwegians worked on a diverse set of side projects: running experiments, building prototypes, solving puzzles and acquiring new skills.

abstract: We present four calculi for gradual typing: λB, based on the blame calculus of Wadler and Findler (2009); λC, based on the coercion calculus of Henglein (1994); and λT and λW, based on the three- some calculi with and without blame of Siek and Wadler (2010). We define translations from λB to λC, from […]

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are open to the interested public–please join us! (There is no need to pre-register for the talk.) abstract: At this year’s WWDC, Apple announced Swift, a new programming language for iOS and OS X development. In this talk, I’d like to give a brief […]

abstract: Automatic device driver synthesis is a radical approach to creating drivers faster and with fewer defects by generating them automatically based on hardware device specifications. I will present the design and implementation of a new driver synthesis toolkit, called Termite-2. Termite-2 is the first tool to combine the power of automation with the flexibility […]

Abstract EasyCrypt is a computer-assisted framework for proving the security of cryptographic constructions. However, there is a significant gap between security proofs done in the usual provable security style and cryptographic implementations used in practice; as a consequence, real-world cryptography is sometimes considered as “one of the many ongoing disaster areas in security. We have […]

Abstract QuickCheck is a powerful library for automatic test-case generation. Because QuickCheck performs random testing, some of the counterexamples discovered are very large. QuickCheck provides an interface for the user to write shrink functions to attempt to reduce the size of counterexamples. Hand-written implementations of shrink can be complex, inefficient, and consist of significant boilerplate […]

Abstract C programs are notoriously difficult to reason about, either for safety or full functional correctness. Even with a program logic powerful enough to prove the necessary properties, the proof has the assumption that the compiler behaves exactly the way it is expected to. Verified Software Toolchain (VST) answers this problem by providing a logic […]