Public Tech Talk: “Expanding the Reach of Fuzzing” by Caroline Lemieux

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Abstract: Software bugs are pervasive in modern software. As software is integrated into increasingly many aspects of our lives, these bugs have increasingly severe consequences, both from a security (e.g. Cloudbleed, Heartbleed, Shellshock) and cost standpoint. Fuzzing refers to a set of techniques that automatically find bug-triggering inputs by sending many random-looking inputs to the […]

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Public Tech Talk: “Stealthy Attacks and Attack-Resilient Interval Estimators”

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

Abstract: Industrial control systems have been frequent targets of cyber attacks during the last decade. Adversaries can hinder the safe operation of these systems by tampering with their sensors and actuators, while ensuring that the monitoring systems are not able to detect such attacks in time. In this talk, we present methods to design and […]

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Public Tech Talk: “Toward Robot Autonomy: Tasks, Plans, and Policies”

Friday, May 28, 2021

Abstract: Robots are increasingly deployed outside of carefully controlled factory settings. Advances in robot motion planning have made it possible to compute feasible motions for complex systems. My work is focused on increasing the abstraction level and time horizon of the types of robot tasks that (a) can be specified, (b) are computationally tractable, and […]

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Public Tech Talk: “Gillian Verification of JavaScript and C”

Wednesday, May 05, 2021

Abstract: We will give a general introduction to Gillian, a platform for the development of symbolic-execution tools for many programming languages.  Gillian currently supports three types of analysis: whole-program symbolic testing; full verification based on separation logic; and automatic compositional testing based on bi-abduction. It uses a core symbolic execution engine with strong mathematical foundations […]

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Public Tech Talk: “Refutation-based Adversarial Robustness Verification of Deep Neural Networks”

Friday, March 26, 2021

Abstract: Advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have increased their deployment in safety-critical systems, such as vision perception modules for autonomous vehicles and airborne collision avoidance system controllers for unmanned aircraft. Modern DNNs and linear classifiers are susceptible to adversarial input perturbations. Adversarial perturbations are small changes to an input that result in unexpected changes […]

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Public Tech Talk: “Toward Automatic Operating System Ports via Code Generation and Synthesis”

Friday, January 22, 2021

The slides for this presentation can be found here. Abstract: Porting operating systems is expensive; it costs time and money and (particularly) the attention of senior developers. Furthermore, with the end of Moore’s Law, portability is becoming more important again. Against this background, recent advances in program synthesis and the increasing availability of formal specifications for machine architectures offer an […]

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Public Tech Talk: “Some Recent Results in Secure Computation”

Friday, October 16, 2020

Abstract: Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows multiple parties, each holding private data that they are unwilling to share, to collaborate to perform computations over their data, while revealing nothing other than the result.  The theory behind secure computation is already 35 years old, but in the last 15 years researchers in the field have demonstrated […]

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Public Tech Talk: “A Semi-Topological View of Real-World Consensus”

Wednesday, October 07, 2020

The slides can be downloaded here. Abstract: In the real world, people join humanity, grow up trusting very different quorums from one another, and they may change their quorums with time.  In technical terms we could call this an open permissionless system with mutable local quorums.   One might expect such a system to be a […]

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Public Tech Talk: “Security-Aware Cyber-Physical Systems with Varying Levels of Autonomy”

Wednesday, September 02, 2020

Abstract: Increasing set of functionalities, network interoperability, and system design complexity have introduced easily exploitable security vulnerabilities in cyber-physical systems (CPS). Furthermore, the tight interaction between information technology and physical world, as well as the rising levels of autonomy, make these systems vulnerable to attacks beyond the standard cyber-attacks; relying exclusively on conventional security techniques […]

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

Thursday, August 06, 2020

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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