Related papers: Formalizing Stack Safety as a Security Property

Cryptographic protocols aim at securing communications over insecure networks such as the Internet, where dishonest users may listen to communications and interfere with them. A secure communication has a different meaning depending on the…

Memory safety is traditionally characterized in terms of bad things that cannot happen. This approach is currently embraced in the literature on formal methods for memory safety. However, a general semantic principle for memory safety, that…

AI safety is still largely framed as alignment: training models to follow human preferences, safety policies, and normative constraints. That framing has improved the behavior of modern language models, but aligned behavior does not by…

The wide availability of data coupled with the computational advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning promise to enable many future technologies such as autonomous driving. While there has been a variety of successful…

Distributed algorithms have many mission-critical applications ranging from embedded systems and replicated databases to cloud computing. Due to asynchronous communication, process faults, or network failures, these algorithms are difficult…

System safety refers to a diverse engineering discipline assessing and improving various aspects of safety in socio-technical systems and their software-intensive sub-systems. While system safety has been a vital area of applied research…

In this dissertation, we present LaSCO, the Language for Security Constraints on Objects, a new approach to expressing security policies using policy graphs and present a method for enforcing policies so expressed. Other approaches for…

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak prompts that elicit harmful or policy-violating outputs, while many existing defenses rely on expensive fine-tuning, intrusive prompt rewriting, or external guardrails that add…

Information flow security is classically formulated in terms of the absence of illegal information flows, with respect to a security setting consisting of a single flow policy that specifies what information flows should be permitted in the…

A typical scenario-based evaluation framework seeks to characterize a black-box system's safety performance (e.g., failure rate) through repeatedly sampling initialization configurations (scenario sampling) and executing a certain test…

Achieving safe and robust autonomy is the key bottleneck on the path towards broader adoption of autonomous vehicles technology. This motivates going beyond extrinsic metrics such as miles between disengagement, and calls for approaches…

Current approaches to AI safety define red lines at the case level: specific prompts, specific outputs, specific harms. This paper argues that red lines can be set more fundamentally -- at the level of value, evidence, and source…

Flow-sensitive type systems offer an elegant way to ensure memory-safety in programming languages. Unfortunately, their adoption in new or existing languages is often hindered by a painful effort to implement or integrate them into…

Informal arguments that cryptographic protocols are secure can be made rigorous using inductive definitions. The approach is based on ordinary predicate calculus and copes with infinite-state systems. Proofs are generated using…

Ensuring the safety and harmlessness of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become equally critical as their performance in applications. However, existing safety alignment methods typically suffer from safety-performance trade-offs and the…

This paper introduces a run-time mechanism for preventing leakage of secure information in distributed systems. We consider a general concurrency language model, where concurrent objects interact by asynchronous method calls and futures.…

Large language models (LLMs) are often assumed to contain ``safety regions'' -- parameter subsets whose modification directly influences safety behaviors. We conduct a systematic evaluation of four safety region identification methods…

One of the most attractive features of untyped languages is the flexibility in term creation and manipulation. However, with such power comes the responsibility of ensuring the correctness of these operations. A solution is adding run-time…

In this paper, we introduce a formal notion of partial compliance, called Attack-resistance, of a computer program running together with a defense mechanism w.r.t a non-exploitability specification. In our setting, a program may contain…

Memory-safety issues and information leakage are known to be depressingly common. We consider the compositional static detection of these kinds of vulnerabilities in first-order C-like programs. Indeed the latter are relational hyper-safety…