Cryptol, SAW, and the Galois Origin Story

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 […]

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Conjuring Correct-by-Construction Code That is Safely Composable System-Wide

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 […]

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Demo: Control SAW From Any Language

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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LINK: A $1M DARPA Contract to Help Scientists Build Better Multiphysics Models

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 One problem is the software and hardware are often outdated, which makes […]

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Part two: Specifying HMAC in Cryptol

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 […]

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Part one: Verifying s2n HMAC with SAW

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 […]

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(Ab)using Compiler Plugins to Improve Embedded DSLs

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 […]

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SMACCMPilot: Open-Source Autopilot Software for UAVs

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 […]

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High-Assurance Base64

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 […]

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