User-friendly Support for Common Concepts in a Lightweight Verifier

Machine verification of formal arguments can only increase our confidence in the correctness of those arguments, but the costs of employing machine verification still outweigh the benefits for some common kinds of formal reasoning activities. As a result, usability is becoming increasingly important in the design of formal verification tools. We describe the "aartifact" lightweight verification system, designed for processing formal arguments involving basic, ubiquitous mathematical concepts. The system is a prototype for investigating potential techniques for improving the usability of formal verification systems. It leverages techniques drawn both from existing work and from our own efforts. In addition to a parser for a familiar concrete syntax and a mechanism for automated syntax lookup, the system integrates (1) a basic logical inference algorithm, (2) a database of propositions governing common mathematical concepts, and (3) a data structure that computes congruence closures of expressions involving relations found in this database. Together, these components allow the system to better accommodate the expectations of users interested in verifying formal arguments involving algebraic and logical manipulations of numbers, sets, vectors, and related operators and predicates. We demonstrate the reasonable performance of this system on typical formal arguments and briefly discuss how the system's design contributed to its usability in two case studies

Extracting information from short messages

Much currently transmitted information takes the form of e-mails or SMS text messages and so extracting information from such short messages is increasingly important. The words in a message can be partitioned into the syntactic structure, terms from the domain of discourse and the data being transmitted. This paper describes a light-weight Information Extraction component which uses pattern matching to separate the three aspects: the structure is supplied as a template; domain terms are the metadata of a data source (or their synonyms), and data is extracted as those words matching placeholders in the templates

Secure multi-party computation for analytics deployed as a lightweight web application

We describe the definition, design, implementation, and deployment of a secure multi-party computation protocol and web application. The protocol and application allow groups of cooperating parties with minimal expertise and no specialized resources to compute basic statistical analytics on their collective data sets without revealing the contributions of individual participants. The application was developed specifically to support a Boston Women’s Workforce Council (BWWC) study of wage disparities within employer organizations in the Greater Boston Area. The application has been deployed successfully to support two data collection sessions (in 2015 and in 2016) to obtain data pertaining to compensation levels across genders and demographics. Our experience provides insights into the particular security and usability requirements (and tradeoffs) a successful “MPC-as-a-service” platform design and implementation must negotiate.We would like to acknowledge all the members of the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, and to thank in particular MaryRose Mazzola, Christina M. Knowles, and Katie A. Johnston, who led the efforts to organize participants and deploy the protocol as part of the 100% Talent: The Boston Women’s Compact [31], [32] data collections. We also thank the Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC), and in particular Executive Director Katherine Lusk, who brought this potential application of secure multi-party computation to our attention. The BWWC, the IOC, and several sponsors contributed funding to complete this work. Support was also provided in part by Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform and Ecosystem (SCOPE), an NSF Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships PFI:BIC project under award #1430145, and by Modular Approach to Cloud Security (MACS), an NSF CISE CNS SaTC Frontier project under award #1414119

Towards lightweight integration of SMT solvers

A large variety of SMT techniques and associated solvers have been developed by the formal modelling and verification communities. For a particular application domain, each technique has its own unique set of advantages and limitations. Within the context of a particular application domain (characterized by a particular set of possible logical formulas), the fitness of a technique can be characterized along multiple dimensions: expressiveness, soundness, completeness, response time, computational cost, and others. Furthermore, certain application domains may require that multiple techniques be used in concert in order to address the particular set of formulas that must be supported. We present a prototype lightweight integrated environment that incorporates four different cloud-hosted SMT solvers behind a single web-based interface: CVC3, Alt-Ergo, Yices, and Z3. Formulas submitted using a common logical syntax are translated into representations suitable for each of the underlying SMT solvers. We discuss the characteristics of each of the SMT solvers, in part by presenting the target syntaxes of the translations (including what outputs the solvers can produce and how this relates to their completeness with respect to the common syntax). We then discuss future directions, including the automated characterization of SMT solvers integrated into the infrastructure in terms of expressiveness, completeness, and response time