Acceleration and semantic foundations of embedded Java platforms

Tableau d'honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2006-200

A static analysis framework for security properties in mobile and cryptographic systems

We introduce a static analysis framework for detecting instances of security breaches in infinite mobile and cryptographic systems specified using the languages of the 7r-calculus and its cryptographic extension, the spi calculus. The framework is composed from three components: First, standard denotational semantics of the 7r-calculus and the spi calculus are constructed based on domain theory. The resulting model is sound and adequate with respect to transitions in the operational semantics. The standard semantics is then extended correctly to non-uniformly capture the property of term substitution, which occurs as a result of communications and successful cryptographic operations. Finally, the non-standard semantics is abstracted to operate over finite domains so as to ensure the termination of the static analysis. The safety of the abstract semantics is proven with respect to the nonstandard semantics. The results of the abstract interpretation are then used to capture breaches of the secrecy and authenticity properties in the analysed systems. Two initial prototype implementations of the security analysis for the 7r-calculus and the spi calculus are also included in the thesis. The main contributions of this thesis are summarised by the following. In the area of denotational semantics, the thesis introduces a domain-theoretic model for the spi calculus that is sound and adequate with respect to transitions in the structural operational semantics. In the area of static program analysis, the thesis utilises the denotational approach as the basis for the construction of abstract interpretations for infinite systems modelled by the 7r-calculus and the spi calculus. This facilitates the use of computationally significant mathematical concepts like least fixed points and results in an analysis that is fully compositional. Also, the thesis demonstrates that the choice of the term-substitution property in mobile and cryptographic programs is rich enough to capture breaches of security properties, like process secrecy and authenticity. These properties are used to analyse a number of mobile and cryptographic protocols, like the file transfer protocol and the Needham-Schroeder, SPLICE/AS, Otway-Rees, Kerberos, Yahalom and Woo Lam authentication protocols

Proving Differential Privacy with Shadow Execution

Recent work on formal verification of differential privacy shows a trend toward usability and expressiveness -- generating a correctness proof of sophisticated algorithm while minimizing the annotation burden on programmers. Sometimes, combining those two requires substantial changes to program logics: one recent paper is able to verify Report Noisy Max automatically, but it involves a complex verification system using customized program logics and verifiers. In this paper, we propose a new proof technique, called shadow execution, and embed it into a language called ShadowDP. ShadowDP uses shadow execution to generate proofs of differential privacy with very few programmer annotations and without relying on customized logics and verifiers. In addition to verifying Report Noisy Max, we show that it can verify a new variant of Sparse Vector that reports the gap between some noisy query answers and the noisy threshold. Moreover, ShadowDP reduces the complexity of verification: for all of the algorithms we have evaluated, type checking and verification in total takes at most 3 seconds, while prior work takes minutes on the same algorithms.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, PLDI'1