Related papers: A Theory of Composable Lingos for Protocol Dialect…

Protocol dialects are methods for modifying protocols that provide light-weight security, especially against easy attacks that can lead to more serious ones. A lingo is a dialect's key security component by making attackers unable to…

Network protocols are programs with inputs and outputs that follow predefined communication patterns to synchronize and exchange information. There are many protocols and each serves a different purpose, e.g., routing, transport, secure…

Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…

Design patterns are distilled from many real systems to catalog common programming practice. However, some object-oriented design patterns are distorted or overly complicated because of the lack of supporting programming language constructs…

Messaging protocols for resource limited systems such as distributed IoT systems are often vulnerable to attacks due to security choices made to conserve resources such as time, memory, or bandwidth. For example, use of secure layers such…

Component-based development is challenging in a distributed setting, for starters considering programming a task may involve the assembly of loosely-coupled remote components. In order for the task to be fulfilled, the supporting…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become central to numerous natural language processing tasks, but their vulnerabilities present significant security and ethical challenges. This systematic survey explores the evolving landscape of attack…

We study linking attacks on communication protocols. We show that an active attacker is strictly more powerful in this setting than previously-considered passive attackers. We introduce a formal model to reason about active linkability…

The design and verification of cryptographic protocols is a notoriously difficult task, even in symbolic models which take an abstract view of cryptography. This is mainly due to the fact that protocols may interact with an arbitrary…

Patterns describe proven solutions for recurring problems. Typically, patterns in a particular domain are interrelated and organized in pattern languages. As real-world problems often require patterns of multiple domains, different pattern…

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

As large language models become integral to high-stakes applications, ensuring their robustness and fairness is critical. Despite their success, large language models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where small perturbations, such…

Large language models (LLMs) employ safety mechanisms to prevent harmful outputs, yet these defenses primarily rely on semantic pattern matching. We show that encoding harmful prompts as coherent mathematical problems -- using formalisms…

A recent study of bugs in real-world concurrent and distributed systems found that, while implementations of individual protocols tend to be robust, the composition of multiple protocols and its interplay with internal computation is the…

In programming, protocols are everywhere. Protocols describe the pattern of interaction (or communication) between software systems, for example, between a user-space program and the kernel or between a local application and an online…

Formal deductive systems are very common in computer science. They are used to represent logics, programming languages, and security systems. Moreover, writing programs that manipulate them and that reason about them is important and…

The structures for the expression of fault-tolerance provisions into the application software are the central topic of this dissertation. Structuring techniques provide means to control complexity, the latter being a relevant factor for the…

Dialectical frameworks are a unifying model of formal argumentation, where argumentative relations between arguments are represented by assigning acceptance conditions to atomic arguments. Their generality allow them to cover a number of…

Input validation is the first line of defense against malformed or malicious inputs. It is therefore critical that the validator (which is often part of the parser) is free of bugs. To build dependable input validators, we propose using…

We propose a new formal criterion for evaluating secure compilation schemes for unsafe languages, expressing end-to-end security guarantees for software components that may become compromised after encountering undefined behavior---for…