Related papers: Program Actions as Actual Causes: A Building Block…
Programs with floating-point computations are often derived from mathematical models or designed with the semantics of the real numbers in mind. However, for a given input, the computed path with floating-point numbers may differ from the…
One of the fundamental skills required for an agent acting in an environment to complete tasks is the ability to understand what actions are plausible at any given point. This work explores a novel use of code representations to reason…
Action research provides the opportunity to explore the usefulness and usability of software engineering methods in industrial settings, and makes it possible to develop methods, tools and techniques with software engineering practitioners.…
Enforcing security requirements in networked information systems relies on security controls to mitigate the risks from increasingly dangerous threats. Configuring security controls is challenging; even nowadays, administrators must perform…
Type-and-effect systems are a widely-used approach to program verification, verifying the result of a computation using types, and the behavior using effects. This paper extends an effect system for verifying temporal, value-dependent…
Game theory provides an effective way to model strategic interactions among rational agents. In the context of formal verification, these ideas can be used to produce guarantees on the correctness of multi-agent systems, with a diverse…
Security policy enforcement in contemporary agentic systems predominantly consists of embedding natural-language policies within an agent's system prompt and delegating compliance to the agent's reasoning. This approach admits no formal…
This paper presents an approach to formalizing and enforcing a class of use privacy properties in data-driven systems. In contrast to prior work, we focus on use restrictions on proxies (i.e. strong predictors) of protected information…
It is important to have multi-agent robotic system specifications that ensure correctness properties of safety and liveness. As these systems have concurrency, and often have dynamic environment, the formal specification and verification of…
Formal analyses of incentives for compliance with network protocols often appeal to game-theoretic models and concepts. Applications of game-theoretic analysis to network security have generally been limited to highly stylized models, where…
We present a method based on program analysis and formal verification to identify conditionally relevant variables (CRVs) - variables which could lead to violation of safety properties in control software when affected by single event…
Precondition inference is a non-trivial problem with important applications in program analysis and verification. We present a novel iterative method for automatically deriving preconditions for the safety and unsafety of programs. Each…
While LLM-based agents are able to tackle a wide variety of code reasoning questions, the answers are not always correct. This prevents the agent from being useful in situations where high precision is desired: (1) helping a software…
Use of formal techniques for verifying the security features of electronic commerce protocols would facilitate, the enhancement of reliability of such protocols, thereby increasing their usability. This paper projects the application of…
To date, most work regarding the formal analysis of access control schemes has focused on quantifying and comparing the expressive power of a set of schemes. Although expressive power is important, it is a property that exists in an…
We consider the problem of specifying and proving the security of non-trivial, concurrent programs that intentionally leak information. We present a method that decomposes the problem into (a) proving that the program only leaks information…
Formal verification provides strong safety guarantees but only for models of cyber-physical systems. Hybrid system models describe the required interplay of computation and physical dynamics, which is crucial to guarantee what computations…
An agent's actions can be influenced by external factors through the inputs it receives from the environment, as well as internal factors, such as memories or intrinsic preferences. The extent to which an agent's actions are "caused from…
We take the position that agent security must be approached as a systems problem: the AI model powering the agent must be treated as an untrusted component, and security invariants must be enforced at the system level. Through this lens,…
Security-critical system requirements are increasingly enforced through mandatory access control systems. These systems are controlled by security policies, highly sensitive system components, which emphasizes the paramount importance of…