Among the many tales of innovation and impact to come from Galois over the years, the origin story of Cryptol and SAW is perhaps the most closely tied with that of the company itself. Today, these open-source verification tools have been used in national security, fintech, and cloud computing applications to keep citizens, systems, and […]

The title of our blog post may sound like a directive from a Dungeon Master, but it’s firmly rooted in Galois’s forward-thinking computer science.  C/C++ code is the foundation of our most critical systems – even “new” systems nearly always incorporate legacy code. But this type of component reuse carries its own dangers because we […]

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. […]

We’re pleased to announce Galois’s LINK project, part of DARPA’s Computable Models (COMPMods) program. The project aims to make it easier for scientists to build multiphysics models with an end-to-end, automatic, and portable solution.  Multiphysics models are challenging to create, customize, and reuse. One problem is the software and hardware are often outdated, which makes […]

This is the third in a series of three blog posts detailing the use of SAW and Cryptol to prove the correctness of the HMAC implementation in Amazon’s s2n TLS library. Part one: Verifying s2n HMAC with SAW. Part two: Specifying HMAC in Cryptol. In the second post, we left off with the Cryptol specification for HMAC. That’s […]

This is the second in a series of three blog posts detailing the use of SAW and Cryptol to prove the correctness of the HMAC implementation in Amazon’s s2n TLS library. Part one: Verifying s2n HMAC with SAW. Part three: Proving Program Equivalence with SAW. In the first post, we described how we proved equivalence between a mathematical description […]

In June 2015, Amazon introduced its s2n library, an open-source TLS library that prioritizes simplicity. A stated benefit of this simplicity is ease of auditing and testing. Galois recently collaborated with Amazon to show that this benefit extends to verifiability by proving the correctness of s2n’s implementation of the keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC) algorithm. To construct this […]

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 […]

As part of DARPA’s High Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS), Galois is building critical flight control software using new software methods for embedded systems programming. Recently, Signal Online reported an overview of the HACMS program. We’ve been working on the HACMS program for about a year and we’d like to share more details about open source work we’ve […]

Author: David Lazar Galois’ mission is improving the trustworthiness of critical systems. Trustworthiness is an inherent property of a system, but we need to produce evidence of its trustworthiness in order for people to make informed decisions. The evidence, and its presentation is a key part of what is often called an assurance case. The […]