Related papers: Better Safe Than Sorry! Automated Identification o…

Science and technology have a growing need for effective mechanisms that ensure reliable, controlled performance from black-box machine learning algorithms. These performance guarantees should ideally hold conditionally on the input-that is…

Users around the world rely on software-intensive systems in their day-to-day activities. These systems regularly contain bugs and security vulnerabilities. To facilitate bug fixing, data-driven models of automatic program repair use pairs…

Software, while beneficial, poses potential cybersecurity risks due to inherent vulnerabilities. Detecting these vulnerabilities is crucial, and deep learning has shown promise as an effective tool for this task due to its ability to…

Access control mechanisms have been adopted in many real-world systems to control resource sharing for the principals in the system. An error in the access control policy (misconfiguration) can easily cause severe data leakage and system…

Logical specifications are widely used to represent software systems and their desired properties. Under system degradation or environmental changes, commonly seen in complex real-world robotic systems, these properties may no longer hold…

Pattern classification systems are commonly used in adversarial applications, like biometric authentication, network intrusion detection, and spam filtering, in which data can be purposely manipulated by humans to undermine their operation.…

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly influencing our decisions and interacting with us in all parts of our daily lives. Therefore, just like for power plants, highways, and myriad other engineered sociotechnical systems, we must…

We present an approach for designing correct-by-construction neural networks (and other machine learning models) that are guaranteed to be consistent with a collection of input-output specifications before, during, and after algorithm…

Runtime misconfiguration can lead to software performance degradation and even cause failure. Developers typically perform sanity checks during the configuration parsing stage to prevent invalid parameter values. However, we discovered that…

An agent must try new behaviors to explore and improve. In high-stakes environments, an agent that violates safety constraints may cause harm and must be taken offline, curtailing any future interaction. Imitating old behavior is safe, but…

Over the past 15 years, researchers have identified an increasing number of security mechanisms that are so unusable that the intended users either circumvent them or give up on a service rather than suffer the security. With hindsight, the…

Instruction fine-tuning has emerged as a critical technique for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific applications. However, recent studies have highlighted significant security vulnerabilities in fine-tuned LLMs. Existing…

System security assurance provides the confidence that security features, practices, procedures, and architecture of software systems mediate and enforce the security policy and are resilient against security failure and attacks. Alongside…

With the increasingly rapid development of new malicious computer software by bad faith actors, both commercial and research-oriented antivirus detectors have come to make greater use of machine learning tactics to identify such malware as…

As software becomes more complex and assumes an even greater role in our lives, formal verification is set to become the gold standard in securing software systems into the future, since it can guarantee the absence of errors and entire…

There are hardly any data sets publicly available that can be used to evaluate intrusion detection algorithms. The biggest threat for industrial applications arises from state-sponsored and criminal groups. Often, formerly unknown exploits…

Features in product lines and highly configurable systems can interact in ways that are contrary to developers' intent. Current methods to identify such unanticipated feature interactions are costly and inadequate. To address this problem…

A number of security mechanisms have been proposed to harden programs written in unsafe languages, each of which mitigates a specific type of memory error. Intuitively, enforcing multiple security mechanisms on a target program will improve…

Optimization of complex functions, such as the output of computer simulators, is a difficult task that has received much attention in the literature. A less studied problem is that of optimization under unknown constraints, i.e., when the…

Embedded systems in safety-critical environments are continuously required to deliver more performance and functionality, while expected to provide verified safety guarantees. Nonetheless, platform-wide software verification (required for…