This research group focuses on mechanised language specification and program verification. We are exploring what it means to build, evaluate, and trust a fully mechanised language specification, using JavaScript as the real-world example language. We are developing library specifications which must be robust with respect to the environment: implementations should not leak; and specifications should be useful to the client. We are developing compositional program reasoning techniques that scale, leading to automatic tools for verifying properties of programs. Our current focus is on modern concurrent separation logics, the development of tools for compositional symbolic analysis using the multi-language platform Gillian, and the specification and verification of Web programs. Much of our work is based on Separation Logic. See details of our fourth-year/MSc course here.
Nov 5, 2021
Philippa gave a talk on Verified Trustworthy Software Specification at this year’s High Integrity Software (HIS) Conference.
Nov 1, 2021
Welcome back to Sacha who has returned from a three-months internship with the CodeGuru team at Amazon Web Services.
Oct 3, 2021
A very warm welcome to Andreas Loow, who has just started with us as a Post-Doctoral researcher.
Sep 3, 2021
We are very happy to welcome Caroline Cronjager, a visiting student from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.
Aug 14, 2021
Philippa Gardner has been announced as one of the recipients of the Spring 2021 Amazon Research Awards (ARA).
TaDA Live: Compositional Reasoning for Termination of Fine-grained Concurrent Programs
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), submitted Jan 2020; accepted 2021., vol.
Gillian, Part II: Real-World Verification for JavaScript and C
Proceedings of the 33rd Computer Aided Verification International Conference, CAV 2021, Virtual Event, July 20-23, 2021, Part II, pp. 827–850
Two Mechanisations of WebAssembly 1.0
Proceedings of the 24th international symposium of Formal Methods (FM21), Beijing, China; November 20-25, 2021
Decidable Inductive Invariants for Verification of Cryptographic Protocols with Unbounded Sessions
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Concurrency Theory, CONCUR 2020, September 1-4, 2020, Vienna, Austria (Virtual Conference), pp. 31:1–31:23
Gillian, Part I: A Multi-language Platform for Symbolic Execution
Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI ’20), June 15–20, 2020, London, UK