We are pleased to announce the release of Cryptol 2.13.0. Cryptol is a language for writing and specifying cryptographic algorithms. This release brings a variety of improvements, including: The sortBy function is now implemented using merge sort instead of insertion sort. This improves both asymptotic and observed performance on sorting tasks. “Type mismatch” errors now […]

Cryptography continues to rapidly transform our world. It seems like every day there’s a new story about fully homomorphic encryption, blockchains, and how these technologies secure billions and even trillions of dollars in assets.  We’ve talked about cryptographic algorithms and twice about cryptographic assurance. People who work with these concepts every day have been the […]

I’m excited to announce our paper “ANOSY: Approximated Knowledge Synthesis with Refinement Types for Declassification” has been accepted to PLDI 2022.  Programs often need to reveal information about private or sensitive data. For example, consider an advertiser who wants to send an advertisement to users near a restaurant. To accomplish this, the advertiser could write […]

I first attended POPL, the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, in Rome, as a first-year grad student in 2013. It was my first real experience in the programming languages (PL) community. My undergraduate advisor presented a paper I had co-authored at a co-located workshop. I attended the programming languages mentoring workshop (PLMW), […]

This year Galois participated in the annual Competition on Software Verification (SV-COMP) for the first time with our verification tool, Crux. Preparing Crux to be in competition shape has been a project several years in the making, and we are very pleased to have reached this milestone. In this post, we will take a closer […]

Prior to spinning out of Galois, engineers from Niobium Microsystems completed work on the 21st Century Cryptography DARPA project. This project developed a proof-of-concept ASIC containing high-performance, low-energy, side-channel resistant implementations of AES-256 cryptographic primitives. These implementations were developed in correct-by-construction fashion, by directly translating formal models of the cryptographic constructs into a hardware implementation […]

2021. Wow. There it went. And far more interesting than most of us anticipated. While weathering the various world storms, we also managed to keep advancing the cause of building trustworthy computing systems. Galois continued pioneering work in formal methods, high-assurance cryptography, machine learning, data science, rigorous digital engineering, and more. From our virtual perch, […]

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 […]