Related papers: Formalizing Stack Safety as a Security Property

Cache coherence protocols based on self-invalidation and self-downgrade have recently seen increased popularity due to their simplicity, potential performance efficiency, and low energy consumption. However, such protocols result in memory…

Compiler optimizations are designed to improve run-time performance while preserving input-output behavior. Correctness in this sense does not necessarily preserve security: it is known that standard optimizations may break or weaken…

The disastrous vulnerabilities in smart contracts sharply remind us of our ignorance: we do not know how to write code that is secure in composition with malicious code. Information flow control has long been proposed as a way to achieve…

In this paper, we investigate the probabilistic formal verification of stochastic dynamical systems over continuous state spaces. Motivated by problems in state estimation and information-flow security, we introduce the notion of…

Memory corruption vulnerabilities are endemic to unsafe languages, such as C, and they can even be found in safe languages that themselves are implemented in unsafe languages or linked with libraries implemented in unsafe languages. Robust…

We present efficient and practical algorithms for a large, distributed system of processors to achieve reliable computations in a secure manner. Specifically, we address the problem of computing a general function of several private inputs…

We consider the problem of efficiently checking a set of safety properties P1,....,Pk of one design. We introduce a new approach called JA-verification where JA stands for "Just-Assume" (as opposed to "assume-guarantee"). In this approach,…

Large language models increasingly rely on explicit chain-of-thought reasoning to solve complex tasks, yet the safety of the reasoning process itself remains largely unaddressed. Existing work focuses predominantly on content safety (i.e.,…

Correctness of concurrent objects is defined in terms of safety properties such as linearizability, sequential consistency, and quiescent consistency, and progress properties such as wait-, lock-, and obstruction-freedom. These properties,…

Software contracts allow programmers to state rich program properties using the full expressive power of an object language. However, since they are enforced at runtime, monitoring contracts imposes significant overhead and delays error…

Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) protect major hazard facilities, e.g. power plants, against catastrophic accidents. An SIS consists of hardware components and a controller software -- the ``program''. Current safety analyses of SIS'…

This position paper argues that the AI/ML community should stop overclaiming and retire the label "positive backdoor," and instead treat trigger-activated hidden behaviors as Secret Alignment. Crucially, protective claims based on Secret…

Automated verification has become an essential part in the security evaluation of cryptographic protocols. In this context privacy-type properties are often modelled by indistinguishability statements, expressed as behavioural equivalences…

Strings are ubiquitous in code. Not all strings are created equal, some contain structure that makes them incompatible with other strings. CSS units are an obvious example. Worse, type checkers cannot see this structure: this is the latent…

For years, Integrated Development Environments have demonstrated their usefulness in order to ease the development of software. High-level security or safety systems require proofs of compliance to standards, based on analyses such as code…

Education in the practical applications of logic and proving such as the formal specification and verification of computer programs is substantially hampered by the fact that most time and effort that is invested in proving is actually…

Modular deductive verification is a powerful technique capable to show that each function in a program satisfies its contract. However, function contracts do not provide a global view of which high-level (e.g. security-related properties of…

Instrumenting programs for performing run-time checking of properties, such as regular shapes, is a common and useful technique that helps programmers detect incorrect program behaviors. This is specially true in dynamic languages such as…

Cyber-Physical Systems have played an essential role in our daily lives, providing critical services such as power and water, whose operability, availability, and reliability must be ensured. The C programming language, prevalent in CPS…

As LLMs advance into autonomous agents with tool-use capabilities, they introduce security challenges that extend beyond traditional content-based LLM safety concerns. This paper introduces Sequential Tool Attack Chaining (STAC), a novel…