Abstract: Rust is a new systems programming language that promises to overcome the seemingly fundamental tradeoff between high-level safety guarantees and low-level control over resource management. Unfortunately, none of Rust’s safety claims have been formally proven, and there is good reason to question whether they actually hold. Specifically, Rust employs a strong, ownership-based type system, but then extends the expressive power […]

Abstract: Recent progress in AI and machine learning is stimulating interest in applying AI in high stakes applications such as self-driving cars, surgical robots, and autonomous weapons systems. These applications require high levels of software assurance and resilience, but virtually all AI research has focused on raw performance without paying attention to questions of robustness […]

Abstract: Complex protocols describing the communication or storage of binary data are difficult to describe precisely. In this talk, I want to explore how to define data types describing a binary data formats and generate the corresponding serialization and deserialization functions from such descriptions. By embedding these data types in a general purpose dependently typed […]

Abstract: In 2015, a language based fundamentally on substructural typing–Rust–hit its 1.0 release, and less than a year later it has been put into production use in a number of tech companies, including some household names. The language has started a trend, with several other mainstream languages, including C++ and Swift, in the early stages […]

abstract: Project E3DB is a tool for programmers who want to build an end-to-end encrypted database with sharing into their projects. We are providing a command-line client for you to play with and a Java SDK to prototype with. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be getting feedback from you, adding features, and making it […]

abstract: Security-critical applications constantly face threats from exploits in lower computing layers such as the OS and Hypervisor, or even attacks from malicious administrators. To protect sensitive data from such privileged adversaries, there is increasing development of secure hardware primitives, such as Intel SGX. Intel SGX instructions enable user mode applications to package trusted code […]

abstract: The domain of Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly expanding beyond research and becoming a major industrial market with such stakeholders as major manufacturers of chips and connected objects, and fast-growing operators of low-power wide-area networks. Importantly, this emerging domain is driven by applications that leverage the infrastructure to provide users with innovative, high-value […]

abstract: Hoare monitors, invented by Brinch Hansen and Hoare in 1973, are widely used to safely handle concurrent programming in different languages ranging from C++11 to Tower, an EDSL developed by Galois as part of the High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) DARPA program. This talk will explain how basic safety properties are assured using Tower, […]

abstract: Existing modeled and verified operating systems (OS’s) typically run on uniprocessor platforms and run with interrupts mostly disabled. This makes formal reasoning more tractable: execution is mostly sequential. The eChronos OS is a real-time OS used in tightly constrained devices, running on (uniprocessor) embedded micro-controllers. It is used in the DARPA-funded HACMS program, where […]

abstract: Due to the exponential growth of our ability to collect, centralize, and share data in recent years we have been able tackle problems previously assumed to be insurmountable. Ubiquitous sensors, fast and efficient machine learning, and affordable commercial-off-the-shelf technologies have not only deepened our understanding of our world, but also democratized these capabilities. As […]