This blog post derived from a presentation given 2021-11-12 at a workshop for the University of Southern California’s Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence. Black-box machine learning (ML) methods, often criticized as difficult to explain, can derive results with an accuracy that matches or exceeds human ability on real-world tasks. This has been demonstrated in […]

We recently hosted the 2021 Galois Balloween Workshop. This year it was held virtually, but we hope to have attendees join us in one of our offices next time. We have all attended so many virtual events in the last year and a half, so we wanted to make this workshop fun, hence the name Balloween. […]

A while back, we announced that we were open-sourcing Crux, a software verification tool. I’d like to work through a slightly more involved example in this post than those presented in the original announcement. In particular, I’d like to give an example of how one might apply Crux to verify functional properties of a system […]

Modern formats, in brief By and large, when people share a document (whether it’s formatted text, visual media, or some combination), they believe that when they both look at it, they’re seeing the same thing. Modern users have arguably been taught/coerced into tolerating small differences (color pallets that are varying degrees of rich-to-washed-out, poop emojis […]

UC-Crux is an open-source command-line tool and Haskell library for performing under-constrained symbolic execution on LLVM code for the sake of exposing bugs or verifying the absence of certain types of undefined behavior. It requires only LLVM bitcode as input. It is built on Galois’s Crucible library for symbolic execution. Under-constrained symbolic execution (developed by […]

That’s right, you. The software engineer who hasn’t taken a logic or formal methods course. You already know formal methods. Sure, you might not be able to build a fancy new proof tool this month, but skills you apply every day are the building blocks of formal methods. What gives? People do PhDs in formal […]

At Galois, we are interested in expanding the capabilities of privacy-preserving technologies, as we believe such technology will play a vital role in our future privacy-sensitive world. One such technology that we’ve been exploring is Homomorphic Encryption (HE), a cryptographic mechanism that allows someone to perform computation on encrypted data. In a previous project, we’ve […]

This post focuses on Galois’s silicon projects and related research efforts around asynchronous circuit design as we approach the 27th IEEE International Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC 2021), to be hosted by Galois as a virtual conference September 7–10, 2021. In a recent blog post, we shared Galois’s interest in asynchronous circuit design. […]

In 1913 Henry Ford invented the assembly line and forever changed the way the world made physical products. For more than 100 years, the industrial society launched new technologies, new industries, and educational programs focused on perfecting manufacturing and scaling automation via incremental improvements over time.  Process improvement techniques that utilize statistics and mathematical concepts, […]

Distributed protocols enable components such as blockchain validator nodes, cloud servers, or IoT devices to coordinate and cooperate toward a common goal. However, in such a diverse environment, a lot of things can go wrong: hardware can fail, software can be buggy, network links can be unreliable, attackers may compromise components, and so on. Due […]