RSS Meetups are monthly gatherings of LASIGE members with research interests mainly in Software Architecture, Verification, Testing, Programming Languages, Type Systems, Logic, Concurrency, and Formal Methods.

Abstract: Cryptographic protocols underly absolutely everything we do on the internet, and yet they are riddled with flaws that are routinely exploited by hackers at great cost for society. Ideally, we would like to certify absence of flaws automatically, but the space of possible attacks is infinite and any verification problem becomes undecidable. We develop a theory of decidable inductive invariants for an infinite-state variant of the Applied pi-calculus, with applications to automatic verification of stateful cryptographic protocols with unbounded sessions/nonces. Since the problem is undecidable in general, we introduce depth-bounded protocols, for which our decidable analysis is sound and complete. Our core contribution is a procedure to check that an invariant is inductive, which implies that every reachable configuration satisfies it. Our invariants can capture security properties like secrecy, can be inferred automatically, and represent an independently checkable certificate of correctness.

Bio: Emanuele D’Osualdo is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Saarbrücken, working on verification of concurrent software with Derek Dreyer. Until September 2020 he was a Marie Curie Fellow at Imperial College London, working with Philippa Gardner. Previously he worked with Prof. Roland Meyer at the University of Kaiserslautern.
His PhD thesis, supervised by Luke Ong at the University of Oxford, received the 2016 CPHC/BCS Distinguished Dissertation award as best of the UK.
The focus of his research has been verification of concurrent systems using methods from separation logic, process algebra, types, model checking, automata, and static analysis.

This presentation is supported by FCT through project SafeSessions, ref. PTDC/CCI-CIF/6453/2020.