Verified concurrent memory management on modern processors. This project aims to formally verify automatic memory managers in the presence of concurrency and the weakly ordered memory of modern processors. A new framework for verifying memory managers, reusable for a wide range of managed programming languages, target hardware, policies, and algorithms will be developed. Expected technical outcomes include improved techniques to ensure trustworthiness of the foundations on which critical softwar ....Verified concurrent memory management on modern processors. This project aims to formally verify automatic memory managers in the presence of concurrency and the weakly ordered memory of modern processors. A new framework for verifying memory managers, reusable for a wide range of managed programming languages, target hardware, policies, and algorithms will be developed. Expected technical outcomes include improved techniques to ensure trustworthiness of the foundations on which critical software infrastructures are built. This will significantly enhance the security of public and private cyber assets, and deliver applications that are more robust and trustworthy, across a range of critical infrastructure such as transportation, communication, energy and defence.Read moreRead less
Effective software vulnerability detection for web services. This project aims to design and implement new and better methods to find vulnerabilities in software services delivered over the web or through the cloud, as well as methods for proving the absence of certain types of vulnerability. So-called injection attacks are pervasive and generally considered the most important security threat on today's Internet. The programming languages used for software services tend to use strings as a unive ....Effective software vulnerability detection for web services. This project aims to design and implement new and better methods to find vulnerabilities in software services delivered over the web or through the cloud, as well as methods for proving the absence of certain types of vulnerability. So-called injection attacks are pervasive and generally considered the most important security threat on today's Internet. The programming languages used for software services tend to use strings as a universal data structure, which unfortunately makes it hard to separate trusted code from untrusted user-provided data. This project intends to develop novel program analysis tools and string constraint solvers, and employ these tools to support sophisticated automated reasoning about string manipulating software.Read moreRead less
Taipan: a block-chain with democratic consensus and validated contracts. Blockchains keep records by mass collaboration using peer-to-peer and cryptographical algorithms. Programmable blockchain technology can disrupt the finance industry, governance, and legal services by reducing the role for intermediaries such as banks and government authorities. This project aims to propose a new block-chain for “Trust Among Individual ParticipANts” (TAIPAN). The main feature of TAIPAN’s programmable block ....Taipan: a block-chain with democratic consensus and validated contracts. Blockchains keep records by mass collaboration using peer-to-peer and cryptographical algorithms. Programmable blockchain technology can disrupt the finance industry, governance, and legal services by reducing the role for intermediaries such as banks and government authorities. This project aims to propose a new block-chain for “Trust Among Individual ParticipANts” (TAIPAN). The main feature of TAIPAN’s programmable block-chain is the integrity and security of individual ownership records that current block-chains lack. This project will aim to overcome two major threats in current programmable block-chains, double-spending among participants, and security vulnerabilities in smart contracts. TAIPAN will provide a democratic and leaderless consensus algorithm that will avoid double-spending, and a new bug-checking framework for smart contracts that finds anomalies before smart contracts are admitted to the block-chain.Read moreRead less