https://software.imdea.org/ Hugo -- gohugo.io en Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/06-15/ Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/06-15/ Passive testing is an approach to verify system behavior by observing logs from normal operation, without actively injecting test stimuli. This paper presents an industrial case study of applying passive testing in the domain of vehicular embedded systems, utilizing two specialized tools: Timed Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (T-EARS) for specifying temporal requirements, and Napkin Studio for evaluating these requirements against real system execution logs. We collaborated with Volvo Construction Equipment (VCE) to translate a set of natural language requirements into structured T-EARS specifications. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2026/06-10/ Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2026/06-10/ Understand the mechanisms available under applicable whistleblowing regulations for reporting serious misconduct or irregularities within the organization. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/06-09-survivor-race/ Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/06-09-survivor-race/ This Sunday, a group from IMDEA Software took part in the Survivor Race 3km run https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/05-28-madquantumcm/ Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/05-28-madquantumcm/ REDIMadrid was responsible for connecting more than 700 kilometers of fiber optics for the MADQuantum-CM project, placing Madrid at the forefront of the quantum internet https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/05-04-eurosys2026/ Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/05-04-eurosys2026/ The research group led by Prof. Thaleia Dimitra Doudali at the IMDEA Software Institute, once again had a strong presence at EuroSys, contributing through research presentations, organizational leadership, and service to the scientific community https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/04-22-acmieee/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/04-22-acmieee/ Georgios Portokalidis has been recognized as a Senior Member by the ACM and the IEEE, two of the world’s leading professional organizations in computing and engineering https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/04-15-foro-rozas/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/04-15-foro-rozas/ On Monday, April 13, 2026, Juan Caballero, researcher at IMDEA Software, participated in the Technology Transfer Forum organized by Las Rozas City Council. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/03-24/ Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/03-24/ In this talk I will look at the application of causality to debugging models and explainability. Specifically, I will talk about actual causality as introduced by Halpern and Pearl, and its quantitative extensions. This theory turns out to be extremely useful in various areas of computer science due to a good match between the results it produces and our intuition. It turns out to be particularly useful for explaining the outputs of large AI systems. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/03-23-feria/ Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/03-23-feria/ ‘From March 19 to 21, thousands of people came to La Nave for their annual appointment with science: the Madrid es Ciencia Fair’ https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/03-17-becalacaixa/ Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/03-17-becalacaixa/ ‘IMDEA Software researcher David Martínez Rubio has been selected to receive a Junior Leader postdoctoral fellowship from “la Caixa” Foundation, one of the most competitive grants in Europe aimed at advancing the scientific careers of early-stage researchers’ https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/03-10/ Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/03-10/ The remarkable advances in AI have given rise to a growing interest in AI-assisted decision support in domains ranging from medicine and drug-discovery, to criminal justice and education. The ultimate goal in AI-assisted decision support is to optimally combine the complementary strengths of humans and AI models to achieve greater outcomes than either can achieve on their own, in short human-AI complementarity. Achieving this goal though, has shown to be a major challenge as it typically requires humans to understand when they can rely on the AI model for their decision, which has shown to be highly non-trivial. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/03-06-transfieresatelec/ Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/03-06-transfieresatelec/ IMDEA Software participates in SATELEC and Transfiere to showcase its research and attract new talent https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2026/03-02/ Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2026/03-02/ Arithmetic theories are first-order logics about number systems, such as the integers or the real numbers. They represent a fundamental branch in mathematical logic, and play a pivotal role in various areas of computer science. Their applications span both theoretical and practical domains, including control theory, mechanical engineering, compiler optimization, and program verification. This talk overviews my recent work on designing procedures for arithmetic theories featuring non-linear functions such as exponentiation and trigonometric functions. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/02-13-11f/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/02-13-11f/ In this new edition of 11F, ETSIInf. UPM and IMDEA Software joined forces to highlight the role of their women researchers in STEM careers https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/02-10/ Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/02-10/ Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are foundational for a future where data can be used without compromising privacy. While the community has largely focused on advancing the cryptographic foundations of PETs, real-world security of PETs is threatened by the very software systems designed to make them accessible, including PET-oriented compilers and frameworks. The goal of my research is to ensure that the practical systems supporting PETs are dependable. In this talk, I will present my work on developing novel, automated techniques to systematically uncover critical vulnerabilities in the software systems of PETs. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/02-09/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/02-09/ Pattern matching is a fundamental feature of functional programming languages that is also being adopted by mainstream object-oriented languages, such as Java and Python. In this talk, I will discuss recent improvements and simplifications we proposed for pattern matching syntax. I will also present our ongoing follow-up work: we propose “composable recursive patterns and transformations”, a new way of writing data-oriented code that can be compiled efficiently and integrates well with structural types and subtyping, making writing such code safer, more modular, and more efficient. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/02-06/ Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/02-06/ Concurrent and distributed systems are pervasive, yet verifying their correctness remains challenging. A core difficulty is heterogeneity: verification techniques developed for one computational model rarely transfer to others. In this talk, I present compositional linearizability, a framework that reconstructs linearizability through a compositional lens. This perspective yields a general theory from which correctness criteria for specific domains can be systematically derived, as demonstrated in work on crash-aware systems and systems with liveness requirements. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-29-s4i/ Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-29-s4i/ On January 28 and 29, IMDEA Software took part in the Science for Industry fair, a specialized event focused on knowledge transfer and innovation. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-28-sh-event/ Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-28-sh-event/ This January 28, during the Software Heritage Summit and Symposium, the agreement between IMDEA Software and INRIA was presented to establish a Software Heritage mirror in Spain, the largest publicly available collection of source code in the world. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-27-erc-dario-fiore/ Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-27-erc-dario-fiore/ Dario Fiore has been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept (PoC), a grant from the European Research Council aimed at translating high-level scientific results into applications with social and industrial impact. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-27/ Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-27/ Current frontiers in machine learning, data science, and, more broadly, artificial intelligence reveal the limits of purely predictive approaches and motivate a shift toward decentralized, scalable, and causal systems. Such systems require processing and learning on increasingly complex networks. A promising heterogeneous toolbox, loosely grouped under the name of Topological Deep Learning (TDL), aims to design deep architectures that integrate ideas from algebraic topology, non-Euclidean geometry, and category theory to address this complexity. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-26/ Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-26/ There is no one-size-fits-all solution to preserving privacy in artificial intelligence and data science. While insights derived from sensitive data can benefit society, privacy is typically at odds with utility, performance, usability, or some combination of these objectives. Furthermore, each system differs in its definition of these objectives and the way they interact with one another. If the cost in any one of these objectives is too high, the system will not be deployed, or worse, deployed with a weakened privacy guarantee, exposing users to potential harm. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-26-sonic/ Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-26-sonic/ IMDEA Software is participating in SONIC (Security Oriented Nexus for Intelligent Commodity Solutions Marketplace), a new European project that officially began on 1 January, 2026 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-20/ Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-20/ Deep learning has revolutionized computer vision, driving face biometric systems to unprecedented levels of accuracy, but also introducing systematic errors that remain difficult to comprehend. This talk explores recent advances in the study of bias in deep face models, showing how disparities arise not just in final decisions, but within the deep feature representations themselves, spanning the learned latent space, neuron activations, and network parameters. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-19/ Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-19/ Decision trees trained using greedy recursive partitioning have existed for decades in machine learning and statistics. However, they have suffered from two critical limitations: they do not optimize a global objective function of the tree parameters, and they use a weak form of partitioning based on a single feature. Recent advances, specifically the tree alternating optimization algorithm, have removed those limitations. This makes it possible to use more powerful types of trees, for example using hyperplane splits, and to apply them to new tasks beyond regression and classification. https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-16-david-martinez-interview/ Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2026/01-16-david-martinez-interview/ David Martínez Rubio, a new researcher at IMDEA Software, explains in this interview his research field and his experience as a Spanish researcher https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-15/ Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2026/01-15/ AI systems like ChatGPT have advanced rapidly, yet their misuse has escalated in parallel. However, we still lack a systematic understanding of how AI systems are misused in the real world and why existing defenses repeatedly fail. This gap results in incomplete or misaligned safeguards, leaving individuals and society vulnerable. In this talk, I will share insights into the misuse of real-world AI systems, which involves understanding user-driven misuse in real-world AI systems, proactively detecting and mitigating AI system misuse, and identifying emerging security risks in the broader AI ecosystem. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/12-22-test-time-award-acsac/ Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/12-22-test-time-award-acsac/ IMDEA Software researcher Georgios Portokalidis has been honored with the ACSAC Test of Time Award for the paper entitled Paranoid Android. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/12-15-carrera-empresas/ Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/12-15-carrera-empresas/ Researchers and staff from IMDEA Software took part as teams in this edition of the Carrera de las Empresas https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/12-09-erc-marco/ Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/12-09-erc-marco/ IMDEA Software researcher Marco Guarnieri has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to develop PRIMULA, a pioneering project aimed at building hardware–software systems that are secure by design against microarchitectural attacks https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/12-04-dimitrios-thesis-award/ Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/12-04-dimitrios-thesis-award/ The Steering Committee of the International Doctoral School of UPM has awarded this recognition to IMDEA Software researcher, Dimitrios Kolonelos https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-27/ Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-27/ Artificial Intelligence has taken the world by storm in the last decade. Given the power artificial intelligent systems possess, it is imperative that they may have negative consequences on health, safety, fundamental rights, democracy, rule of law and environment. It is hence necessary to take an approach towards AI that is cautious of its negative consequences. However, AI is a very powerful technique with potential to boost the economic growth of human civilization. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-25-mipa/ Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-25-mipa/ IMDEA Software researcher Alessandra Gorla has been honored with the MIP Award for her paper “Automated Test Input Generation for Android: Are We There Yet?” https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-24/ Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-24/ Totally ordered shared logs have become a key component in modern distributed systems, serving as a building block to ensure consistent execution of operations across replicas and partitions. A key challenge in designing this type of systems is to achieve low latency appends, given that total order requires coordination among participants and, in most designs, this coordination is in the critical path of the application. We present a novel design that removes coordination from the critical path, allowing appends to the log to be executed with low latency. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-21-lambdaworld/ Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-21-lambdaworld/ IMDEA Software took part in Lambda World as a sponsor and contributed both to the program committee and to the scientific activities of the event https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-19-ramonycajalkaushik/ Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-19-ramonycajalkaushik/ The fellowship will enable him to form a research team and develop his work at IMDEA Software https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-13-semana-ciencia/ Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-13-semana-ciencia/ The students from CEIPSO Padre Garralda spent Thursday morning learning about software at our institute https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-12-tech/ Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/11-12-tech/ On November 12, the Director of IMDEA Software highlighted the IMDEA Institutes during the opening talk of the Tech-Hub 6G event https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-11/ Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-11/ Decentralized Finance (DeFi) leverages blockchain technology to provide financial services without intermediaries, relying on smart contracts to automate economic transactions. As of October 2025, DeFi protocols are estimated to manage over $100 billion in Total Value Locked, making them ideal targets for attacks. The complexity of DeFi protocols’ incentive mechanisms, combined with their entanglement in low-level implementation details, makes it challenging to precisely assess their structural and economic properties, analyse user strategies and attacks, and ensure that the code accurately reflects the intended functionalities. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-05/ Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-05/ I will present Zinc, a proof system that addresses the problem of high arithmetization costs in proof systems. Arithmetization is the step where one turns the computation/relation one wants to prove into a constraint that is in a suitable form for the proof system. In many natural applications this step is very costly, in the sense that the final constraints is easily of ‘size’ 16x or 32x than the original computation. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-04/ Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/11-04/ In this talk we present a variant of vertex cover on temporal graphs that has been recently introduced for timeline activities summarization in social networks. The problem has been proved to be NP-hard, even in restricted cases. We present algorithmic contributions for the problem. First, we present an approximation algorithm of factor O(T log n), on a temporal graph of T timestamps and n vertices. Then, we consider the restriction where at most one temporal edge is defined in each timestamp. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/10-21-xxjrm/ Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/10-21-xxjrm/ The event took place at the IMDEA Software institute and brought together members of the REDIMadrid project to discuss the current state of the network and its future challenges https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/10-10-iclp-lopstr/ Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/10-10-iclp-lopstr/ Researchers from IMDEA Software participated this September in the international conferences ICLP, LOPSTR, and PPDP in Italy, where they presented their advances in logic programming, formal verification, and Prolog education https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/10-08-icpr/ Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/10-08-icpr/ From October 1 to 3, the IMDEA Software Institute was the venue chosen this year to host the 19th International Conference on Reachability Problems (RP’25). https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/10-07/ Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/10-07/ Modern systems face security challenges at every layer of the stack, from user authentication to machine learning and software execution. In this talk, we present three lines of research aimed at strengthening defenses. First, we discuss advances in password deception, including honeyword generation and breach detection frameworks that address practical weaknesses in existing approaches. Next, we examine the security of machine learning-based services, highlighting vulnerabilities such as membership inference, model inversion, and adversarial text generation, and analyzing why many attacks fail in realistic settings. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/10-03-visita-de-la-beihang/ Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/10-03-visita-de-la-beihang/ Professors from Beihang University visited the IMDEA Software Institute to explore new avenues of collaboration https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-30/ Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-30/ Polymarket is a prediction market platform where users can speculate on future events by trading shares tied to specific outcomes, known as conditions. Each market on Polymarket is associated with a set of one or more such conditions. To ensure proper market resolution, the condition set must be exhaustive—collectively accounting for all possible outcomes—and mutually exclusive—only one condition may resolve as true. Thus, the collective prices (probabilities) of all related outcomes (whether in a condition or market) should be $1, representing a combined probability of 1 of any outcome. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/09-29-ern/ Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/09-29-ern/ The deputy director of IMDEA Software, Antonio Fernández, and researcher Gibran Gómez took part on Friday the 26th in the event organized at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-26/ Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-26/ Robotic systems are starting to revolutionize many applications, from transportation to health care, assisted by technological advancements, such as cloud computing, novel hardware design, and novel manufacturing techniques. However, several of the characteristics that make robots ideal for certain future applications such as autonomy, self-learning, knowledge sharing, can also raise concerns in the evolution of the technology from academic institutions to the public sphere. Blockchain, an emerging technology originated in the digital currency field, is starting to show great potential to make robotic operations more secure, autonomous, flexible, and even profitable. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-19/ Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-19/ The Linux kernel task scheduler is controls what task runs on what CPU and at what time, and hence is critical for all application performance. At the same time, because it has no precise information about application behavior, the Linux kernel task scheduler amounts to an immense collection of intertwined heuristics that are difficult to understand and evolve. We are investigating whether program verification, by forcing the declaration and checking of function specification can help understand the current state of the source code and protect its good properties over time. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/09-15-google/ Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/09-15-google/ This summer, Georgia Christofidi had the opportunity to spend three months at Google’s South Lake Union office in Seattle as a Student Researcher https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-04/ Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-04/ A labelled transition system is a directed graph whose edges are labelled with letters from a finite alphabet. The vertices of the digraph are the states of the system, and, for an input letter, the system nondeterministically choses an outgoing edge labelled by this letter and moves to the next state according to it. If there are no such outgoing edges, the system “dies”, that is, moves to an unsafe state. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-02/ Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/09-02/ Privacy concerns in smart contracts have led to systems that protect on-chain data but still rely on trusted off-chain parties. We propose a novel framework for doubly private execution that addresses both on-chain and off-chain privacy, allowing clients to submit requests confidentially to potentially untrusting servers that collaboratively process these requests without learning client identities or data. Our implementation, Jigsaw, extends the ZEXE architecture and Collaborative zkSNARKs to enable efficient proof generation by server groups. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/01-09-pets/ Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/01-09-pets/ Diego Castejón, PhD researcher at IMDEA Software, presents MixBuy at PETS 2025, the premier venue for privacy-enhancing technologies https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/08-28-crypto2025/ Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/08-28-crypto2025/ The work of Daniele Cozzo, together with other researchers from the institute, was presented at the Crypto 2025 conference https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/08-18-imdea-wikipedia/ Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/08-18-imdea-wikipedia/ IMDEA Software now has its own entry on Wikipedia, the well-known free encyclopedia created by its users https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/08-13-investigadores-de-imdea-software/ Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/08-13-investigadores-de-imdea-software/ Thaleia Dimitra Doudali and Georgios Portokalidis reflect on five years of Artifact Evaluation at EuroSys, offering insights and a roadmap to strengthen reproducibility in systems research https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-16-galamariamaeztu/ Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-16-galamariamaeztu/ IMDEA Software received the María de Maeztu accreditation at the ceremony held on July 16 in Zaragoza, presided over by Ministers Diana Morant and Pilar Alegría. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-14-visitaupm/ Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-14-visitaupm/ The rectoral team of the Polytechnic University of Madrid visits IMDEA Software to strengthen institutional ties and explore new avenues for collaboration. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-09-adabyronpremios/ Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-09-adabyronpremios/ IMDEA Software, platinum sponsor of the 11th edition of the Ada Byron Programming Contest, presented the first prize to the “UPC1” team, winners of the final held this past weekend in Madrid. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-03-somma/ Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-03-somma/ Manuel Carro, Director of IMDEA Software, took part in the SOMMa Alliance meeting, reaffirming the institute’s commitment to scientific excellence in Spain. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-02-adabyron/ Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/07-02-adabyron/ IMDEA Software continues to support young talent as a platinum sponsor of the 11th edition of the AdaByron programming contest, taking place on July 4 and 5 in Madrid. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/06-23-postercompetition/ Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/06-23-postercompetition/ This year’s edition featured 14 research projects and two first prizes were awarded. Figures that reflect both the quality of the work presented and the high level of participation. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/06-27-gibran-premio/ Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/06-27-gibran-premio/ The paper “Measuring Data Pollution in Cryptocurrency Abuse Reporting Services,” presented by Gibran Gómez, earned the team this recognition. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/06-25/ Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/06-25/ In today’s world, we are witnessing several challenges to the traditional formats of scientific publishing as a mechanism for sharing, validating, and receiving feedback on new ideas. These disruptions include over-reliance on metrics, predatory practices in publication venues, and metrics gamming by authors. Some of these behaviours not only hurt the development of science and add noise to the system, but also can ruin the career development of researchers. In this talk, we will discuss these challenges and hopefully find some clues on how to navigate them and present some actionable insights. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/06-17/ Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/06-17/ Markov decision processes can be viewed as transformers of probability distributions, giving rise to a sequence of distributions over MDP states. This view is useful in many applications, e.g., modeling robot swarms or chemical reaction networks, where the behavior is naturally interpreted as probability distributions over states. Somewhat surprisingly, in this setting basic reachability and safety problems turn out to be computationally intractable. The issue is further complicated by the question of how much memory is allowed: even for simple examples, policies for safety objectives over distributions can require infinite memory and randomization. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/06-16-georgios-portokalidis-cybersecurity/ Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/06-16-georgios-portokalidis-cybersecurity/ Georgios Portokalidis, Associate Research Professor at IMDEA Software, has published an article in The Conversation https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/06-02/ Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/06-02/ Water theft claims between 30% and 50% of the global water supply, and despite policy efforts to tackle it, is still on the rise. The policy failure to tackle water theft has been attributed to the nonlinear adaptive responses by economic agents such as irrigators, which can affect and be affected by other socioeconomic (e.g., growing commodity prices) and ecological processes (e.g., water scarcity) via feedback loops with cascading impacts that are difficult to foresee. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/05-28-workshop-on-secret-sharing/ Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/05-28-workshop-on-secret-sharing/ The team presented their work on verifiable secret sharing schemes at this international forum held in Tarragona https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2025/05-26/ Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2025/05-26/ Workshop on presentation skills, in preparation for our annual poster competition https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/05-22/ Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/05-22/ The talk will be on microarchitecture research and why it plays an important role in our day-to-day computing world, keeping application developers, compiler writers, and OS designers in mind. A major part of the talk will be about microarchitects(my mentees) and their untold stories on some of the microarchitecture techniques that improve system performance (ISCA 2020, MICRO 2022), energy (MICRO 2022), scalability (MICRO 2023), and security (ISCA 2024, MICRO 2024). https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/05-19-eurocrypt/ Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/05-19-eurocrypt/ IMDEA Software led the organization of this prestigious international cryptography conference, held for the first time in the Madrid region https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/05-14-masmadridvisita/ Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/05-14-masmadridvisita/ This visit is part of an initiative by members of the Madrid Assembly to gain a closer understanding of the IMDEA Institutes ecosystem https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/05-13-eurosysasplos/ Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/05-13-eurosysasplos/ Researchers from the institute actively participated in the EuroSys and ASPLOS 2025 conferences, held jointly in Rotterdam, contributing through keynote talks, workshop organization, and research presentations by PhD students https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2025/04-29/ Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2025/04-29/ Explore a new way of understanding and transforming conflict. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/04-24/ Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/04-24/ The talk covers recent research, conducted by the speaker and his PhD students, aimed at addressing the challenges of high-throughput, low-latency stream processing across the cloud–edge continuum. As centralized data collection becomes increasingly impractical due to the sheer volume of data, transitioning to approaches that push computation closer to the edge emerges as both a promising and necessary alternative. However, the limited and often shared resources available on edge devices pose significant challenges to this shift. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2025/04-23/ Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2025/04-23/ Explore a new way of understanding and transforming conflict. https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/04-14-mariademaetzu/ Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/04-14-mariademaetzu/ The accreditation recognizes the scientific excellence of IMDEA Software and strengthens its role in the generation and transfer of knowledge https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/04-08/ Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/04-08/ A common approach to solving problems in the sciences is to reduce them to solving some kind of system of equations. While in engineering and physics those systems often involve quantities over the reals, computer science predominantly deals with discrete domains such as the integers. However, performing arithmetic over the integers is computationally expensive, affecting both decidability and complexity. In some cases, solutions even grow too large to be explicitly constructed. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2025/04-03/ Thu, 03 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2025/04-03/ In this talk (which includes an extended introduction so that even non-cryptographers can follow along) we explore Homomorphic Signatures for NP (HSNP). HSNPs allow us to verify that a signed result is indeed the outcome of a specified (potentially complex) computation on signed inputs. This powerful notion was introduced by Fiore and Tucker at CCS 2022, where they combined zero-knowledge SNARKs (for succinct proof of correct computation) with linearly homomorphic signatures (LHS) to verify operations on streaming data. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/03-25/ Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/03-25/ Market fragmentation across multiple Automated Market Makers (AMMs) creates inefficiencies such as costly arbitrage, unnecessarily high slippage and delayed incorporation of new information into prices. These inefficiencies raise trading costs, reduce liquidity provider profits, and degrade overall market efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a modification of the Constant Product Market Maker (CPMM) pricing mechanism, called the Global Market Maker (GMM), which aggregates liquidity information from all AMMs to mitigate these inefficiencies. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/03-24/ Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/03-24/ The dominant guiding philosophy in the first sixty years of Computer Science was for designers to design systems that were always correct, and to accept nothing less as users. But times have changed: Users and designers are accustomed to systems with statistical components and behaviors. What does it mean for the formal methods community? In this talk, we argue that such a dramatic change in the acceptance and design of systems presents exciting opportunities to make fundamental contributions: we need to rethink the notions and techniques for the design of specifications and verification methodologies. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2025/03-18/ Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2025/03-18/ [No advanced knowledge of cryptography needed! Content suitable for a general audience]. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) stands as the gold standard for digital privacy. But how does this cryptographic shield truly work—and why does it matter for businesses and individuals alike? We dive into the true meaning of E2EE, presenting why simple mechanisms to achieve authenticity and confidentiality do not suffice. We will borrow examples from cloud storage and secure messaging to understand how protocols can self-heal after breaches, ensuring past and future data stays locked even if current keys are leaked. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/03-06/ Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/03-06/ Reasoning about hyperproperties of concurrent implementations, such as the guarantees these implementations provide to randomized client programs, has been a long-standing challenge. Standard linearizability enables the use of atomic specifications for reasoning about standard properties, but not about hyperproperties. A stronger correctness criterion, called strong linearizability, enables such reasoning, but is rarely achievable, leaving various useful implementations with no means for reasoning about their hyperproperties. In this paper, we focus on registers and devise non-atomic specifications that capture a wide-range of well-studied register implementations and enable reasoning about their hyperproperties. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/03-04/ Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/03-04/ Byzantine agreement, a fundamental problem in distributed computing, enables $N$ processes to reach consensus on a common value despite up to $T < N$ arbitrary failures. It serves as the backbone of critical distributed services such as distributed key generation (DKG), secure multi-party computation (MPC), blockchain technologies, and state machine replication (SMR), highlighting its crucial role in modern computing. Despite their importance, existing agreement protocols face significant limitations. Many struggle to scale efficiently due to poor performance or heavy reliance on cryptographic tools such as threshold signatures, which require expensive setup and computationally intensive algebraic operations. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/02-20/ Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2025/02-20/ In the zoo of programming languages there are two cute yet rather misbehaved animals, typically found in the Dynamic Languages section: the Duck Typing and the Monkey Patching. The Duck Typing is hardly seen. You hear a “quack!”, but you can’t easily tell if it’s coming from an actual duck, a parrot, or a recording. Monkey Patching, like the name suggests, patches any existing creature to change their behavior. It can even make a dog quack! https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2025/02-18/ Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2025/02-18/ This paper investigates ER(r^Z), that is the extension of the existential theory of the reals by an additional unary predicate r^Z for the integer powers of a fixed computable real number r > 0. If all we have access to is a Turing machine computing r, it is not possible to decide whether an input formula from this theory satisfiable. However, we show an algorithm to decide this problem when: https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/01-21-datia/ Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2025/01-21-datia/ The DATIA project has officially started its activities at IMDEA Software after being awarded earlier this year by the Regional Government of Madrid under the 2023 Innovation Hubs call https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-31-kaushik-interview/ Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-31-kaushik-interview/ The newest assistant professor of the IMDEA Software Institute comes from Kolkata in India, and is passionate about food, travel, and science and technologies. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-23-floating-wind-energy/ Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-23-floating-wind-energy/ This breakthrough seeks to foster collaboration between industry and academia, driving innovation in floating wind technologies. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-12-mixbuy-protocol/ Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-12-mixbuy-protocol/ MixBuy is the first cryptographic protocol that simultaneously ensures a secure digital purchase and hides the relationship between store and customer. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2024/12-11/ Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2024/12-11/ With the increasing popularity of blockchains, cryptocurrencies are now accepted for the purchase of digital goods, such as e-books or gift cards. A contingent payment is a cryptographic protocol that models digital purchases, and it involves a buyer and a seller. The buyer owns crypto-coins, and the seller owns a digital product. Contingent payment ensures that the buyer and the seller can exchange coins and product securely. However, observers of the blockchain might learn which buyer purchased from which seller based on the information contained in the transaction. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-09-thaleia-cesar-nombela-grant/ Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-09-thaleia-cesar-nombela-grant/ This grant will provide her with 420,000 euros for 5 years to attract outstanding and talented young researchers from abroad and help them integrate into the Spanish research ecosystem. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-05-italian-embassy-visit/ Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/12-05-italian-embassy-visit/ The visit took place in order to seek synergies and avenues for collaboration with Italian research institutions and the technological ecosystem. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/12-03/ Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/12-03/ Many blockchain networks aim to preserve the anonymity of validators in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network, ensuring that no adversary can link a validator’s identifier to the IP address it is running from, due to associated privacy and security concerns. This talk presents work that demonstrates that the Ethereum P2P network does not offer this anonymity. I will present our methodology that enables any node in the network to identify validators hosted on connected peers and empirically verify the feasibility of the proposed method. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-28-best-paper-award-ccs/ Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-28-best-paper-award-ccs/ IMDEA Software researchers Gilles Barthe, Marco Guarnieri, David Mateos Romero and co-authors present LmSpec and LmTest, tools to safeguard cryptographic libraries from microarchitectural leaks. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-26-confidential-6g/ Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-26-confidential-6g/ Ignacio Cascudo’s team has presented two papers so far this year related to confidential computing technologies and privacy preservation for the 6G network. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-18-gymkhana/ Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-18-gymkhana/ Event organized by the IMDEA Software Institute, on the occasion of the Madrid Science and Innovation Week. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/11-07/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/11-07/ State-of-the-art solvers for constrained Horn clauses (CHC) are successfully used to generate reachability facts for software using its symbolic encoding. In this talk, I will present a new application of CHCs to test-case generation, a problem of finding a set of tuples of input values to a program under which the program visits as many branches as possible. The key insight to achieve maximality is to identify and skip blocks of code that are provably unreachable. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/11-05/ Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/11-05/ The FIDE Laws of Chess establish that if a player runs out of time during a game, they lose unless there exists no sequence of legal moves that ends in a checkmate by their opponent, in which case the game is drawn. The problem of determining whether or not a given chess position is unwinnable for a certain player has been considered intractable by the community and, consequently, chess servers do not apply the above rule rigorously, thus unfairly classifying many games. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-05-jornadas-redimadrid/ Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-05-jornadas-redimadrid/ On October 15, IMDEA Software and REDIMadrid held the conference at the center’s auditorium. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-04-disc/ Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/11-04-disc/ The event took place at the Instituto de Ingeniería de España from October 28th to November 1st. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-29/ Tue, 29 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-29/ Petri nets (PN) are a popular formalism to represent concurrent systems. However, they lack support for modelling and analysing system families, like variants of controllers, process models, or configurations of flexible assembly lines. a Petri net product line (PNPL) defines a collection of similar systems compactly. A PNPL represents a set of Petri nets with different admissible derivations. Having just one artefact allows for analysing all derivable nets of a family more efficiently at the same time, instead of one by one. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2024/10-24/ Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2024/10-24/ The massive scale and heterogeneity of current workloads and platforms, such as cloud applications and large machine learning models, break the effectiveness of conventional resource management approaches and create the need for new, custom-tailored systems solutions. The use of machine learning methods can enable robust management decisions, but comes with substantial overheads, practicality and interpretability concerns, therefore it is crucial to enable its practical use. In this talk, I will demonstrate data-driven insights and observations that enable the use of lightweight prediction models for forecasting resource usage and improving upon cloud resource efficiency. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-21/ Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-21/ Indirect surveys have been used for decades by epidemiologists and social scientists to estimate the size of sub-populations within social networks. In these surveys, respondents provide information about their social connections, making them particularly useful for monitoring hard-to-reach or sensitive populations, such as disaster casualties, drug use prevalence, or the spread of infectious diseases. These indirect responses, known as Aggregated Relational Data (ARD), are analyzed using various statistical methods collectively referred to as the Network Scale-Up Method (NSUM). https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-11/ Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-11/ This talk starts with a result in classical Finite Automata Theory: Two regular languages with the same number of words for each length can be mapped one onto the other by a letter-to-letter (finite) transducer. The notion of generating function of regular languages leads to the in- troduction of the model of weighted automata. The conjugacy of weighted automata, a concept borrowed to symbolic dynamics, is then defined and it is shown how the above statement can be derived from the central result of this work: Two equivalent weighted automata are conjugate to a third one when the weight semiring is B, N, Z, or any Euclidean domain (and thus any (skew) field). https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-10/ Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-10/ Not many results in Computer Science are recognised to be as basic and fundamental as Kleene Theorem. It states the equality of two sets of objects that we call now languages. A slight change of focus on this result shows how it is essentially the combination of two families of algorithms: algorithms that transform a finite automaton into a regular expression on one hand and algorithms that build a finite automaton from a regular expression on the other. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-08/ Tue, 08 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-08/ Virtually all computer programs are written in high-level languages. A suitable source language can impose certain desirable properties (like memory or type safety), or it can facilitate reasoning about a program satisfying a given spec (formally or informally). However, there is a deep gulf between programs as they are written and executed: compiled to low-level representations, and running in an untrusted medium where source-level guarantees dissolve. And whereas the correctness of compilation is a well-understood problem with proven solutions, its security considerations are much less clear. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/10-04-noche-europea-investigadores/ Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/10-04-noche-europea-investigadores/ Once again, the Residencia de Estudiantes hosts the event coordinated by the Fundación para el Conocimiento madrimasd and framed within the Horizonte Europa Program. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/09-30-niki-test-award-icfp/ Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/09-30-niki-test-award-icfp/ The paper received the award because it industrialised the verification technology of refinement types and presented the tool Liquid Haskell that is actively used 10 years later both for education and software verification. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-02/ Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/10-02/ SMT (Satisfiability Modulo Theories) solving is a technology for the fully automated solution of logical formulas. SMT solvers can be used as general-purpose off-the-shelf tools. Due to their impressive efficiency, they are nowadays frequently used in a wide variety of applications. A typical application encodes real-world problems as logical formulas, whose solutions can be decoded to solutions of the real-world problem. Besides its unquestionable practical impact, SMT solving has another great merit: it inspired truly elegant ideas, which do not only enable the construction of efficient software tools, but provide also interesting theoretical insights. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/09-24-best-paper-icalp/ Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/09-24-best-paper-icalp/ The flagship research meeting on Automata, Logic, Semantics, and Theory of Programming awarded Alessio and his coauthors Dmitry Chistikov and Mikhail Starchak for a paper providing a NP procedure to decide whether a linear-exponential system of constraints has an integer solution. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/09-24/ Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/09-24/ Unsafe languages, like C and C++, have long been the preferred choice for systems programming thanks to their unique feature sets and performance characteristics. Over the years, developers all around the world have built up huge code bases in unsafe languages without fully realizing that their loose language specifications and lack of safety checks make even the most carefully written programs rife with undefined behavior and memory errors. Hackers routinely exploit these memory errors to infiltrate systems or to force them to leak confidential information. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/09-10-madqci-nature/ Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/09-10-madqci-nature/ César Sánchez and David Rincón from REDIMadrid are part of the authors of the article that publishes the conclusions of three years of tests. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/08-27/ Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/08-27/ Dynamically typed array languages such as Python, APL, and Matlab lift scalar operations to arrays and replicate scalars to fit applications. We present a mechanism for automatically inferring map and replicate operations in a statically-typed language in a way that resembles the programming experience of a dynamically-typed language while preserving the static typing guarantees. Our type system, which supports parametric polymorphism, higher-order functions, and top-level let-generalization, makes use of integer linear programming in order to find the minimum number of operations needed to elaborate to a well-typed program. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/07-29-fixcheck/ Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/07-29-fixcheck/ The FIXCHECK tool offers a robust and effective solution in the field of software maintenance, reveals bugs and prevents the introduction of inadequate corrections in the software. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/07-23-cm-visit/ Tue, 23 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/07-23-cm-visit/ Manuel Carro and María Alcaraz welcomed and accompanied the delegation on its tour around the Institute. Researchers Aleks Nanevski, Juan Caballero, Alessandra Gorla and Manuel Hermenegildo explained what IMDEA Software is working on. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/07-09-adabyron/ Tue, 09 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/07-09-adabyron/ The event took place at the Computer Science School of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on July 5 and 6. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/07-03/ Wed, 03 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/07-03/ Traitor-tracing systems allow identifying the users who contributed to building a rogue decoder in a broadcast environment. In a traditional traitor-tracing system, a key authority is responsible for generating the global public parameters and issuing secret keys to users. All security is lost if the key authority itself is corrupt. This raises the question: Can we construct a traitor-tracing scheme, without a trusted authority? In this work, we propose a new model for traitor-tracing systems where, instead of having a key authority, users could generate and register their own public keys. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/07-02-womencourage/ Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/07-02-womencourage/ The event was hosted by the School of Engineering of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, from June 26th to 28th https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2024/06-25/ Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2024/06-25/ Cryptography plays a prominent role in today’s increasingly digital society. In fact, virtually all existing systems rely on cryptography at their core. Therefore, it is utterly important to build and analyze cryptographic protocols to secure real world systems. In this talk, I will share my vision for establishing secure and privacy-preserving blockchain applications through cryptographic protocols by showcasing examples of my work in the field. As an example, I will present our research on adaptor signatures, a novel cryptographic scheme that binds the creation of a digital signature to the knowledge of a cryptographic secret other than the signing key. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/06-25-poster-competition/ Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/06-25-poster-competition/ Last Friday, June 21, we celebrated “My I[M]DEA Software: Poster Competition”, an edition with 11 participants https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/06-13/ Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/06-13/ The recent years have seen remarkable progress in establishing the complexity of the reachability problem for vector addition systems with states (VASS), equivalently known as Petri nets. Existing work primarily considers the case in which both the VASS as well as the initial and target configurations are part of the input. In this talk, we investigate the reachability problem in the setting where the VASS and the final configuration are fixed and only the initial configuration is variable. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/06-07/ Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/06-07/ The problem of Byzantine consensus has been key to designing secure distributed systems. Although it is well known that both safety and liveness are at risk as soon as n/3 Byzantine processes fail, very few works attempted to characterize precisely the faults that produce safety violations from the faults that produce termination violations.We present a new lower bound on the solvability of the consensus problem by distinguishing deceitful faults violating safety and benign faults violating termination from the more general Byzantine faults, in what we call the Byzantine-deceitful-benign fault model. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/04-29-press-release-ai-image/ Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/04-29-press-release-ai-image/ A team of researchers from the IMDEA Software Institute, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and NEC Laboratories Europe has introduced a novel framework that promises to improve the efficiency and practicality of verifiable computation. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/04-24-luismi-danielsson-thesis/ Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/04-24-luismi-danielsson-thesis/ Researcher Luis Miguel Danielsson, advised by Professor César Sánchez, has defended his thesis, titled: “Decentralized and Distributed Stream Runtime Verification” https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/04-24/ Wed, 24 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/04-24/ Approximate fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes such as the CKKS scheme (Asiacrypt ’17) are popular in practice due to their efficiency and utility for machine learning applications. Unfortunately, Li and Micciancio (Eurocrypt, ’21) showed that, while achieving standard semantic (or IND-CPA security), the CKKS scheme is broken under a variant security notion known as IND-CPAD. Subsequently, Li, Micciancio, Schultz, and Sorrell (Crypto ’22) proved the security of the CKKS scheme with a noise-flooding countermeasure, which adds Gaussian noise of sufficiently high variance before outputting the decrypted value. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/04-22-joakim-ohman-thesis/ Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/04-22-joakim-ohman-thesis/ Researcher Joakim Öhman, supervised by Professor Aleks Nanevski, presented his thesis: “Compositional Reasoning of Concurrency with the Visibility Method” https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/04-19/ Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/04-19/ In this talk I will present the work I have done concerning the specification and analysis of normative documents using deontic-based formalisms. I will also discuss challenges in the area and future research directions, including applications in smart contracts. Short bio: Gerardo Schneider received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University Joseph Fourier (thesis done at the VERIMAG laboratory), Grenoble (France), in 2002. From 2003 till 2009 he was a researcher at Uppsala University (Sweden), Irisa/INRIA Rennes (France), and the University of Oslo (Norway). https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/03-29-transfiere/ Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/03-29-transfiere/ As in previous editions, in 2024 the Institute participated in the Research and Innovation Space of the Madrid Regional Government. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/03-18-silvia-sebastian-thesis-180s/ Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/03-18-silvia-sebastian-thesis-180s/ Unveils a novel automated approach to attribution, significantly transforming the process of identifying entities responsible for cyberattacks https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-19/ Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-19/ This talk will show some of the recent advances we are doing at Microsoft Research towards agents capable of modeling complex environments and human behaviors, which is a key goal of artificial intelligence research. My team focuses on applications of AI in video games, as this has the potential of empowering game developers to realize new creative visions. The talk is split in two parts. In the first one, I will focus on diffusion models as generative models of human behavior. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-18/ Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-18/ Recent years have been pivotal in the field of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) security, with a large number of high-profile attacks exposing the lack of a design-for-security initiative in ICS. The evolution of ICS abstracting the control logic to a purely software level hosted on a generic OS, combined with hyperconnectivity and the integration of popular open source libraries providing advanced features, have expanded the ICS attack surface by increasing the entry points and by allowing traditional software vulnerabilities to be repurposed to the ICS domain. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-15/ Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-15/ Adversaries exploit vulnerabilities to compromise systems. For instance, a vulnerability in a Web browser sandbox may allow an attacker to leak private data. Reducing the number of bugs improves security guarantees. We will discuss two key scenarios of system security: detecting bugs introduced by developers and bugs introduced by compilers. Since software is written by human beings, any program suffers from bugs. Improving testing prevents bugs from reaching production environments. Even for bug-free programs, compilers can still introduce hideous side effects that undermine the security premises. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/03-11-madrid-is-science-fair/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/03-11-madrid-is-science-fair/ The Fair, which took place between March 7 and 9 at IFEMA, was attended by ten IMDEA Software researchers. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-07/ Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-07/ Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are now ubiquitous among automated technologies, in which physical dynamical systems are operated via software-based controllers. Since a majority of CPS applications are safety-critical, certifying correctness of their controllers is an important research problem. A promising approach is to use formal methods, which enables us to design CPS controllers with rigorous correctness guarantees with respect to given specifications. Unfortunately, the formal methods approaches still face practical bottlenecks (like scalability and expressiveness) in the real-world applications. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-04/ Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/03-04/ Many security mitigation techniques rely on program analysis. Languages such as C/C++ support the use of pointers for indirect memory accesses. For applications written in these languages, the accuracy of program analysis, and thus the effectiveness of security mitigation, depends on the precision of the underlying pointer analysis techniques. However, despite decades of research into pointer analysis, achieving precise and scalable pointer analysis remains an open problem. In this talk, I will describe my research on improving the scalability and precision of pointer analysis algorithms for software security. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/02-29/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/02-29/ We live in an era of unprecedented compute availability. The advent of the cloud allows anyone to deploy critical high-performance applications that serve millions of users without owning or managing any computational resources. The goal of my research is to enable the development of such high-performance applications with robust correctness guarantees. To achieve this goal, I build practical programmable software systems that target realistic workloads in widely-used environments. My systems are rooted in solid foundations, incorporating formal specifications and techniques drawn from the programming languages, compilers, and formal methods literature. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/02-27/ Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/02-27/ Indistinguishability obfuscation turns a program unintelligible without altering its functionality. Because it captures the power of most known cryptographic primitives and enables new ones, obfuscation is often referred to as being crypto-complete. In this work we investigate constructions of indistinguishability obfuscation, whose security can be reduced from potentially hard problems over lattices. Compared to other candidates, a purely lattice-based obfuscator has the advantage of being based on a single source of hardness and being plausibly post-quantum, enabling many applications in quantum cryptography. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/02-23-mujer-nina-ciencia/ Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/02-23-mujer-nina-ciencia/ This is the second edition of an event that was born to publicize the science developed by women scientists of the Montegancedo Campus, on the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/02-21-kyveli-thesis/ Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/02-21-kyveli-thesis/ IMDEA Software researcher Kyveli Doveri presented her doctoral thesis: “A Uniform Approach to Language Containment Problems” last Friday, February 16 at the ETSIINF of the UPM. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/02-15/ Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/02-15/ This talk will go over the basics of the PageRank problem, studied initially by the founders of Google, which allowed them to create their search engine by applying it to the internet graph with hyperlinks defining edges. Then, I will explain our new results on the problem for undirected graphs, whose main application is finding local clusters in networks, and is used in many branches of science. We have now algorithms that find local clusters fast in a time that does not depend on the whole graph but on the local cluster itself, which is significantly smaller. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/02-07-social-media-workshop/ Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/02-07-social-media-workshop/ The workshop, given by Mike Young, was focused on aspects related to how to use social media to increase impact or how to engage with your peers and access opportunities, among other things https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/02-06-thesis-dimitris-kolonelos/ Tue, 06 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/02-06-thesis-dimitris-kolonelos/ The IMDEA Software researcher made yesterday his thesis defense: “Succinct Cryptographic Commitments with Fine-Grained Openings for Decentralized Environments” https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2024/01-30/ Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2024/01-30/ Context: It is not easy to switch gears and go from writing scientific papers to communicating science on social media, but it can be personally and professionally rewarding. This workshop will focus on how to use social media to increase your impact, network with your peers, and get access to opportunities in both academia and industry, using mainly the platforms LinkedIn and X (or alternatives to X) as professional tools. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/01-29-qci-days-vienna/ Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/01-29-qci-days-vienna/ The event, organized by the Austrian Institute of Technology was a unique opportunity to discuss the latest trends in secure quantum communication. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/01-23/ Tue, 23 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2024/01-23/ A strong argument in favour of dynamically-typed programming languages is their flexibility, enabling quick code writing and prototyping. But this is also a weakness, as many bugs are only detected when executing the program. Hence, statically-typed versions of well-known languages are in rapid expansion, such as Typescript or Luau. To guarantee the safety of a program without sacrifing expressivity, augmenting types with set operations, such as union and intersection, has proven very useful. https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/01-19-s4i/ Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2024/01-19-s4i/ The event, organized by the Autonomous University of Madrid and BeAble Capital, is the largest international meeting on deep science. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/12-22-giorgios-interview/ Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/12-22-giorgios-interview/ The latest Associate Research Professor to join IMDEA Software knew he wanted to study something related with computers from de age of 11. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/12-20-opodis-award/ Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/12-20-opodis-award/ Researchers Alejandro Naser-Pastoriza and Alexey Gotsman, together with Gregory Chockler proposed an algorithm for partially synchronous consensus, representing a significant leap forward in the field. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/12-18-cybercrime-revenue/ Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/12-18-cybercrime-revenue/ Gibran Gomez, Kevin van Liebergen, and Juan Caballero show that cybercriminals’ Bitcoin revenue is largely underestimated and may be up to 39 times higher. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/12-15-dpn-online-fraud/ Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/12-15-dpn-online-fraud/ The research, involving researchers from IMDEA Software, IMDEA Networks and UC3M, exposes the worldwide misuse of public SMS gateways for illicit activities. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-29-euroqci-spain-forum/ Wed, 29 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-29-euroqci-spain-forum/ The event organized by the EuroQCI-Spain consortium took place between November 28th and 29th, at the BAT Tower in Bilbao. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-23/ Thu, 23 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-23/ This study investigates the security landscape of space mission protocols, examining standards set by the Consultative Committee of Space Data Systems (CCSDS) and the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS). The analysis reveals a common reliance on security through obscurity rather than the incorporation of robust security features. The research introduces TMTC Sec Kit, a toolkit designed for CCSDS and ECSS space mission protocols. With parsing and crafting capabilities, the toolkit exposes potential vulnerabilities in spacecraft communications traffic, showcasing the ability to compromise confidentiality in space link communication. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-22-2/ Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-22-2/ The limited scripting capabilities in Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies have forced implementations of smart contracts as multi-party cryptographic protocols. To streamline this process, the BitML language allows for defining simple smart contracts and automatically translates them into protocols over transactions in the respective currency. However, BitML is limited to contracts operating upon the same cryptocurrency whereas many interesting financial applications involve assets on different blockchains, inducing more complicated cryptographic protocols for enforcing synchronous execution across these systems. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-22-1/ Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-22-1/ This talk will explore a general protocol for securely realizing atomic swaps across cryptocurrencies. In atomic swaps, assets can be exchanged atomically between blockchains without relying on a trusted party. Generalizing atomic swaps to directed graphs of a particular class allows the description of a broad class of interesting blockchain protocols, that rely on atomic transaction execution. Following this observation, this presentation broadens the class of swap graphs considered in prior work and defines a new protocol for securely realizing such graphs from more general primitives. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-21-machine-learning/ Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-21-machine-learning/ IMDEA Software researchers Georgia Christofidi, Konstantinos Papaioannou and Thaleia Dimitra Doudali raise this intriguing question in their most recent publication at the 14th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-21/ Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-21/ Smart contracts are distributed applications on blockchains that implement advanced financial instruments, such as decentralized exchanges or autonomous organizations (DAOs). Their financial nature makes smart contracts an attractive attack target, as demonstrated by numerous exploits on popular contracts resulting in economic damage of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, vulnerability assessment that is sound and insightful for smart contracts is a formidable challenge because contracts execute low-level bytecode in a largely unknown and potentially hostile execution environment. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-20-thesis-silvia-sebastian/ Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-20-thesis-silvia-sebastian/ She presents a novel automated approach to attribution, significantly transforming the process of identifying entities responsible for cyberattacks. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-18-gymkhana-software-matters/ Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-18-gymkhana-software-matters/ On November 16, the Institute held an event on the occasion of the XXIII Science and Innovation Week of the Community of Madrid, organized by the Madri+d Foundation for Knowledge. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-17-madrimasd-conference/ Fri, 17 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-17-madrimasd-conference/ Google Campus hosts the R&D&I conference on the occasion of the Madrid Science and Innovation Week, which was attended by representatives of startups, IMDEAs and clusters. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/11-14/ Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/11-14/ Robust forecasts of future resource usage in cloud computing environments enable high efficiency in resource management solutions, such as autoscaling and overcommitment policies. Production-level systems use lightweight combinations of historical information to enable practical deployments. Recently, Machine Learning (ML) models, in particular Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks, have been proposed by various works, for their improved predictive capabilities. Following this trend, we train LSTM models and observe high levels of prediction accuracy, even on unseen data. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-13-workshop-geraldine/ Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/11-13-workshop-geraldine/ Geraldine Fitzpatrick was the facilitator of the workshops aimed toto craft better research cultures and enable researchers to bring their best selves to their great work. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-08-1/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-08-1/ Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is one of the most common formalisms for expressing properties of systems in formal verification and other fields. However, its propositional nature limits its applicability to finite-state systems, whereas many interesting scenarios often require reasoning in an infinite-state settings. Indeed, many formalisms and techniques have been proposed in the last decades to specify and verify infinite-state systems. This talk presents our take at the problem. We recently introduced LTL Modulo Theories (LTLMT), a first-order extension of LTL that provides both a general and expressive theoretical framework to reason about infinite-state specification and verification, and encouraging early experimental evidence of its applicability, thanks to the ability to exploit efficient off-the-shelf Satisfiability Modulo Theories solvers. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-08-2/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/11-08-2/ Non-Interactive Verifiable Secret Sharing (NI-VSS) is a technique for distributing a secret among a group of individuals in a verifiable manner, such that shareholders can verify the validity of their received share and only a specific number of them can access the secret. VSS is a fundamental tool in cryptography and distributed computing. In this paper, we present an extremely efficient NI-VSS scheme using Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs on secret shared data. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/11-07/ Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/11-07/ Full-day in-person workshop for PhD students and Postdocs https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/11-06/ Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/11-06/ Half-day in-person workshop for Faculty https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-31-threats-smart-homes/ Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-31-threats-smart-homes/ “In the Room Where It Happens: Characterizing Local Communication and Threats in Smart Homes,” was presented this week at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/10-31/ Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/10-31/ Polynomial programs are imperative programs with real-valued variables, i.e. imperative programs in which all expressions appearing in assignments, conditions, and guards are polynomials over program variables. A template-based synthesis of polynomial programs refers to the synthesis of missing polynomial expressions of a polynomial program given the pre and post-condition of the program. The template-based synthesis problem in general can be readily reduced to solving a logical formula with a quantifier alternation. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-30-jornadas-redimadrid/ Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-30-jornadas-redimadrid/ The UNED Las Rozas Campus hosted the Conference organized by the IMDEA Softaware Institute and REDIMadrid. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/10-30/ Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/10-30/ Knox is a new framework that enables developers to build hardware security modules (HSMs) with high assurance through formal verification. The goal is to rule out all hardware bugs, software bugs, and timing side channels. Knox’s approach is to relate an implementation’s wire-level behavior to a functional specification stated in terms of method calls and return values with a new definition called information-preserving refinement (IPR). This definition captures the notion that the HSM implements its functional specification, and that it leaks no additional information through its wire-level behavior. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/10-25/ Wed, 25 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/10-25/ In this talk we demonstrate decidability for the intuitionistic modal logic S4 first formulated by Fischer Servi [1]. This solves a problem that has been open for almost thirty years since it had been posed in Simpson’s PhD thesis in 1994 [2]. We obtain this result by performing proof search in a labelled deductive system [3] that, instead of using only one binary relation on the labels, employs two: one corresponding to the accessibility relation of modal logic and the other corresponding to the order relation of intuitionistic Kripke frames. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-20-di-awards/ Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-20-di-awards/ Manuel Carro, attended yesterday the D+I Innovation Awards 2023, which took place at the Espacio Bernabéu La Salle by Eneldo. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-17-paristech-visit/ Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-17-paristech-visit/ Some faculty showed to the 57 students the research areas of the Institute on September 21 from 9:30 to 11:00. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-09-europena-researchers-night/ Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/10-09-europena-researchers-night/ The event “The five EU missions as seen by IMDEA researchers II” took place on September 29 at the Student Residence in Madrid. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/10-04/ Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/10-04/ Phishing is one of the most common forms of social engineering attacks and is regularly used by criminals to compromise millions of accounts every year. Numerous solutions have been proposed to detect or prevent identity thefts, but phishers have responded by improving their methods and adopting more sophisticated techniques. One of the most recent advancements is the use of browser fingerprinting. In particular, fingerprinting techniques can be used as an additional piece of information that complements the stolen credentials This is confirmed by the fact that credentials with fingerprint data are sold for higher prices in underground markets. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/09-29/ Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/09-29/ Cryptographic voting protocols have recently seen much interest from practitioners due to their use in countries such as Estonia, Switzerland, France, and Australia. Practical protocols usually rely on tested designs, such as the mixing-and-decryption paradigm. There, multiple servers verifiably shuffle encrypted ballots, which are then decrypted in a distributed manner. While several efficient protocols implementing this paradigm exist from discrete log-type assumptions, the situation is less clear for post-quantum alternatives such as lattices. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/09-22-quantum-comms-plan-meeting/ Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/09-22-quantum-comms-plan-meeting/ The event took place from September 19 to 21 at the School of Industrial Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/09-20-deep-dive-virustotal/ Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/09-20-deep-dive-virustotal/ Kevin Van Liebergen, Juan Caballero, Platon Kotzias and Chris Gates publish an article based on the study of malware behavior in different types of files analyzed by VirusTotal and Gen Digital antivirus. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/09-19/ Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/09-19/ In this talk, I will introduce and motivate a well-studied probabilistic variant of the classic inclusion problem between formal languages. Also known as probabilistic model checking, the problem asks to determine the probability that a word drawn randomly from some known probability measure L (often modelling the behaviour of a system to be verified) is contained in a target language M (modelling the desired system specification). As in the traditional setting, probabilistic language inclusion is typically studied through the lens of automata theory. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/09-13/ Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/09-13/ Recently, in June, our group submitted a new proposal, namely FAEST, to the current NIST PQ signature (additional round) competition. By taking advantage of a new proof system (QuickSilver) based on VOLE-in-the-Head (Vector Linear Oblivious Evaluation), FAEST allows a significant decrease in both signature size and sign/verify time when compared to the state of the art MPC-in-the-Head designs. Currently, we are exploring other possible ways one can further improve the FAEST performance. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/09-08-alessio-mansutti-interview/ Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/09-08-alessio-mansutti-interview/ The Assistant Research Professor of the IMDEA Software Institute ended pursuing a PhD for an accident that he will never regret. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/07-13/ Thu, 13 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/07-13/ In this talk, we address the problem of the (reactive) realizability of specifications of theories richer than Booleans, including arithmetic theories. Our approach transforms theory specifications into purely Boolean specifications by (1) substituting theory literals by Boolean variables, and (2) computing an additional Boolean requirement that captures the dependencies between the new variables imposed by the literals. The resulting specification can be passed to existing Boolean off-the-shelf realizability tools, and is realizable if and only if the original specification is realizable. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/07-11/ Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/07-11/ A key aspect of the adoption of blockchain technologies is their performance. Consequently, many techniques to improve the scalability of blockchains are being developed. Current blockchains require consensus algorithms to guarantee that transactions, batched as blocks, are totally ordered. Imposing a total order, although it is safe, may be unnecessary for some applications. A promising approach to improve scalability is Setchain, a distributed concurrent data type that implements Byzantine tolerant distributed grown-only sets with barriers (called epochs). https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/07-04/ Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/07-04/ Abstract interpretation provides an over-approximation of program behaviours that is used to prove the absence of bugs. The ideal scenario for abstract interpretation is that of a complete analysis, where false alarms cannot arise. Unfortunately for any non-trivial abstract domain there is some program whose analysis is incomplete. In this talk we discuss an approach to characterizing classes of complete programs on some non-trivial abstract domains for studying their expressiveness. To this aim we present the notion of bounded domains and show the implications arising from the possibility of conducting a complete analysis on such domains. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/07-04-acm-fellow-award/ Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/07-04-acm-fellow-award/ The ACM Fellows program was established in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/06-27-2/ Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/06-27-2/ Guillermo Errezil will talk about the work, goals and collaborations of Formal Vindication. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/06-27-isabel-contreras-sistedes/ Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/06-27-isabel-contreras-sistedes/ “A scalable static analysis framework for reliable program development exploiting incrementality and modularity” is the title of his thesis, directed by professors Manuel Hermenegildo and José Francisco Morales. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/06-27-1/ Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/06-27-1/ Leakage contracts have recently been proposed as a new security abstraction at the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level. Such contracts aim to faithfully capture the information processors may leak through side effects of their microarchitectural implementations. However, so far, we lack a verification methodology to check that a processor actually satisfies a given leakage contract. In this talk, we will introduce LeaVe, the first tool for verifying register-transfer-level (RTL) processor designs against ISA-level leakage contracts. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/06-21/ Wed, 21 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/06-21/ Although in many occasions the protection of information systems is achieved by implementing obscure procedures, the proper implementation of robust and efficient security means should be conducted according to Kerckhoff’s principle. In this sense, open source software and hardware can be interpreted to foster co-creation in the field of information security and cybersecurity. The definition of standards solutions and the promotion of technical interoperability can help to build crowdintelligence for the exhaustive definition and validation of security requirements and attack models. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/06-20/ Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/06-20/ In this talk, we present a new framework, called polyhedral abstraction, for checking safety properties on Petri nets, that is checking if some reachable state satisfy a property of interest. This is an important and difficult problem with many practical applications: obviously for the formal verification of concurrent systems, but also for the study of diverse types of protocols (such as biological or business processes), the verification of software systems, the analysis of infinite state systems, etc. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/06-19-poster-competition/ Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/06-19-poster-competition/ The IMDEA Software Institute holds for the second time an event aimed at predoctoral staff to present their work through posters. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/06-14/ Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/06-14/ Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge proofs (NIZKs) allow a prover to convince a verifier about the validity of a claim without revealing any additional information about the claim. Most commonly, the security of NIZKs is analysed in isolation, under stand-alone security properties, such as zero knowledge and knowledge soundness. However, NIZKs do not exists in isolation, and are inherently transferable, i.e., one can take an existing valid proof and prove a new statement (even an invalid one) by reusing or modifying the observed proof. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/06-13/ Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/06-13/ We study implementations of basic fault-tolerant primitives, such as consensus and registers, in message-passing systems subject to process crashes and a broad range of communication failures. Our results characterize the necessary and sufficient conditions for implementing these primitives as a function of the connectivity constraints and synchrony assumptions. Our main contribution is a new algorithm for partially synchronous consensus that is resilient to process crashes and channel failures and is optimal in its connectivity requirements. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/05-31/ Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/05-31/ In this talk, we give a brief introduction to probabilistic programming and present Zar: a formally verified compiler pipeline from discrete probabilistic programs with unbounded loops in the conditional probabilistic guarded command language (cpGCL) to proved-correct executable samplers in the random bit model. We exploit the key idea that all discrete probability distributions can be reduced to unbiased coin-flipping schemes. The compiler pipeline first translates cpGCL programs into choice-fix trees, an intermediate representation suitable for reduction of biased probabilistic choices. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-31-madqci/ Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-31-madqci/ The network will connect data centers of the universities of the Community of Madrid and the IMDEA Software and IMDEA Networks Institutes https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-22-konstantinos-eurosys/ Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-22-konstantinos-eurosys/ EuroSys is a premier conference on various aspects of systems software research and development, including its ramifications for hardware and applications https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-18-model-driven-engineering-workshop/ Thu, 18 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-18-model-driven-engineering-workshop/ The workshop brought together experts from different branches of research within Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to discuss their techniques, advances and applications to different domains https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-12-miguel-morona-tfg/ Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-12-miguel-morona-tfg/ His work: “Algebraic Constraint Systems for Cryptographic Proofs applied to SHA-256” provides the basis for the demonstration and verification of hash code through matrices. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/05-04/ Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/05-04/ Many proofs of interactive cryptographic protocols (e.g., as in Universal Composability) operate by proving the protocol to be observationally equivalent to an idealized specification. Formal tool support for proving observational equivalence of cryptographic protocols is a nascent area of research. Current tools either support only certain forms of observational equivalence or require an amount of proof effort that makes large-scale verification infeasible. To bridge this gap, we introduce equational techniques for cryptography in the computational model. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-03-mathador/ Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/05-03-mathador/ Aleks Nanevski has dedicated his life to solving one of the biggest computer science challenges, taking a long and risky road towards revolutionizing how we think about programming https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/04-25-martin-ceresa-thesis/ Tue, 25 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/04-25-martin-ceresa-thesis/ When modifying a program, it must be shown that the semantics of the program are preserved. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/04-20/ Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/04-20/ The continuously increasing interest in intelligent autonomous systems underlines the need for new developments in cyber-physical systems that can learn, adapt, and reason. Towards this direction, we will formally analyze the properties of learning for inference, verification, and control of general systems, when time and computational resources are limited, and robustness and interpretability are prioritized. We will focus on the notion of progressive learning: an adaptive process that hierarchically approximates the solution of an optimal decision-making problem given real-time observations of a system and its environment. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/04-14/ Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/04-14/ Computer systems and software play a vital role in the functioning of our society. Ensuring their security is of utmost importance and is more relevant now than ever before. Although various security measures have made it more challenging, adversaries keep finding innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities around them. In this talk, I will share my vision for establishing trustworthy software and systems by showcasing examples of my work in the field. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/04-13/ Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/04-13/ Contents: Introduction to Diversity & Gender equity Gender bias at work Workplace Policies and Practices that stymie Progress Address Gender Equity in Your Workplace This course is for IMDEA Software staff only. Bio: Silvia Pascual Ortiz is a certified Open ExO Coach, Trainer, and Consultant who has been working in the gender equality and diversity arena since 2010, helping organizations to build Gender Equality Plans, delivering awareness training on gender equality and diversity subjects, gender bias, etc. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/04-11/ Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/04-11/ Autonomous Systems offer hope towards moving away from mechanized, unsafe, manual, often inefficient practices. Last decade has seen several small, but important, steps towards making this dream into reality. These advancements have helped us to achieve limited autonomy in several places, such as, driving, factory floors, surgeries, wearables and home assistants, etc. Nevertheless, autonomous systems are required to operate in a wide range of environment with uncertainties (viz., sensor errors, timing errors, dynamic nature of the environment, etc. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/03-31/ Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2023/03-31/ In this talk I will present two algorithms to decide the language inclusion problem between Büchi automata. Our approach leverage a notion of quasiorders to prune the search for a counterexample by discarding candidates which are subsumed by others for the quasiorder. Discarded candidates are guaranteed to not compromise the completeness of the algorithm. The first algorithm uses two quasiorders, one for the prefixes and one for the periods of ultimately periodic words. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/03-30/ Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/03-30/ Contents: Introduction to Diversity & Gender equity Gender bias at work Workplace Policies and Practices that stymie Progress Address Gender Equity in Your Workplace This course is for IMDEA Software staff only. Bio: Silvia Pascual Ortiz is a certified Open ExO Coach, Trainer, and Consultant who has been working in the gender equality and diversity arena since 2010, helping organizations to build Gender Equality Plans, delivering awareness training on gender equality and diversity subjects, gender bias, etc. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/03-28/ Tue, 28 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/03-28/ Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) allows a set of mutually distrusting parties to jointly perform a computation on their private inputs in a way no information about their inputs is revealed, except the output of the computation. The use of MPC is promising in real-life situations that demand both privacy and computation at the same time. The aim of my research is to advance our understanding of the feasibility of tasks related to MPC, and to construct efficient MPC protocols in various adversarial and network settings. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/03-27-feria-madrid-es-ciencia/ Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/03-27-feria-madrid-es-ciencia/ From March 23rd to 25th IMDEA Institutes participated in the science outreach Fair aimed at school communities and the general public. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/03-13-adabyron/ Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/03-13-adabyron/ Manuel Carro, Juan Céspedes and Margarita Capretto have been part of the competition jury, and Ignacio Ballesteros has been part of the organizing committee https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/03-02/ Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/03-02/ Open Access (OA) is a mechanism that allows for free and immediate access to research results and data. It aims to enhance global dissemination, reduce research duplication, and increase the use of scientific contributions in teaching programs, among others. However, a survey has revealed that many researchers need more adequate knowledge about OA and the transition to it. While making research products openly available is a great idea for communicating science and knowledge, shifting the costs from readers to authors induces risks that must be identified, understood, and analyzed. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/02-24-bienal-ciencia/ Fri, 24 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/02-24-bienal-ciencia/ Martín Ceresa and Gabina Bianchi represented the Institute at the Circulo de Bellas Artes https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/02-17-transfiere/ Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/02-17-transfiere/ Juan José Collazo, Project Manager of IMDEA Software, attended on behalf of the Institute and shared space with colleagues from other IMDEAs. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/02-16/ Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2023/02-16/ Contents: Review of concepts of mental health and wellness What does it mean to experience wellness? Personal wellbeing vs institutional wellbeing Personal selfcare practices vs institutional selfcare practices Experiential activity: SWOT analysis by areas (research, admin, IT) Promoting a wellness culture at work: Who are we and who do we want to be? What’s the main institutional goal and what’s the goal of each area (research, admin, IT)? What are the values and culture we want to promote as a community? https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/02-13/ Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/02-13/ The most widely studied language for expressing statements in the context of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs is arithmetic circuit satisfiability. In this talk we present circom, a programming language and a compiler that allows the programmer to provide a low-level description of the arithmetic circuit together with an effective way to execute it. Challenging constraint manipulation and analysis problems will be introduced as well as some safety properties of circom programs that need to be checked. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/02-13-mujer-nina/ Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/02-13-mujer-nina/ An event organized by the Campus research centers. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/02-08-confidential6g-kickoff/ Wed, 08 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/02-08-confidential6g-kickoff/ The project has a consortium composed of 12 entities. The Spanish participation is represented by the IMDEA Software Institute and the company Telefónica Research and Development. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/02-07/ Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/02-07/ Non-volatile main memory (NVMM) is a new tier in the memory hierarchy that offers jointly the durability of spinning disks, near-DRAM speed and byte addressability. This talk presents J-NVM, a fully-fledged interface to use NVMM in the Java language. J-NVM relies on proxy objects that intermediate direct off-heap access to NVMM. We present the internals of J-NVM and how to use it in the context of a modern distributed data store. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/02-02/ Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/02-02/ Self-adaptation is often defined as the ability of systems to alter at runtime their behaviour in response to changes in their environment, capabilities and goals that were unforseen at design time. I will discuss why I believe one interesting route to achieving self-adaptation is to endow systems with the capability of synthesising at runtime discrete event controllers.I will provide an overview of the work we have done in this direction and some of the challenges that remain, covering software architectures, modelling and learning approaches for defining novel discrete event cotrol problems, and algorithms to solve them. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/01-31/ Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/01-31/ The context-free language (CFL) reachability problem on graphs (as well as a closely related problem of language emptiness for pushdown automata) is a core problem for interprocedural program analysis and model checking. It can be solved in cubic time but, despite years of efforts, there is no truly sub-cubic algorithm known for it. We study the related certification task: given a problem instance, are there small and efficiently checkable certificates for the existence and for the non-existence of a path? https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/01-30/ Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2023/01-30/ Smart contracts are immutable programs deployed on the blockchain that can manage significant assets. Because of this, verification and validation of smart contracts is of vital importance. Indeed, it is industrial practice to hire independent specialized companies to audit smart contracts before deployment. Auditors typically rely on a combination of tools and experience but still fail to identify problems in smart contracts before deployment, causing significant losses. In this talk, I will discuss our experience using predicate abstraction to construct models which can be used by auditors to explore and validate smart contact behaviour at the function call level by proposing predicates that expose different aspects of the contract. https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/01-19-acm-fellow-hemenegildo/ Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2023/01-19-acm-fellow-hemenegildo/ The Association for Computing Machinery, has named 57 of its members, including Manuel Hermenegildo, ACM Fellows for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions to Computer Science. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/12-21/ Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/12-21/ Microarchitectural attacks, such as Spectre and Meltdown, illustrate that artifacts of hardware implementations (like speculative and out-of-order execution) can result in measurable side-effects on program execution time that attackers can exploit to compromise a system’s security. These attacks arise from emerging behaviors obtained when combining hardware and software. Building systems that are resistant against these attacks requires fundamentally rethinking the design of existing security mechanisms. In this talk, I will focus on speculative execution attacks–a specific class of microarchitectural attacks–and I will illustrate a principled approach for reasoning about security against these attacks. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/12-18-openqkd/ Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/12-18-openqkd/ The OPENQKD project culminates after three years of duration and a budget of 15 million euros financed by the European program Horizon Europe 2020. The consortium, which is made up of 38 members, 4 of them Spanish, has installed a test quantum communication infrastructure in several European countries. Institute IMDEA Software has participated in the OPENQKD project, through REDIMadrid, by providing the physical infrastructure and personnel expertise. Classical and quantum communications will in the near future jointly secure the ICT needs of European governments, service industries (e. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/12-16-openqkd-days/ Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/12-16-openqkd-days/ The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid has led the organization of the event. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/12-15/ Thu, 15 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/12-15/ The ongoing renaissance in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to the advent of data-driven machine learning (ML) methods deployed within components for sensing, actuation, and control in safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS). While such learning-enabled components (LECs) are enabling autonomy in systems like autonomous vehicles and robots, ensuring such components operate reliably in all scenarios is extraordinarily challenging, as demonstrated in part through recent accidents in semi-autonomous/autonomous CPS and by adversarial ML attacks. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/12-14/ Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/12-14/ A counterfactual explanation refers to the problem of finding a minimum change to a given input instance that will result in a desired prediction under a given, trained machine learning model. This is useful to extract actionable knowledge such as “reducing your weight by 10 kg will reduce your risk of stroke by 80%” (regression) or “you will be eligible for the loan if you increase your annual salary by $10k” (classification). https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/12-13-watch-your-back/ Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/12-13-watch-your-back/ Researchers Gibran Gómez, Pedro Moreno-Sánchez and Juan Caballero develop “Watch Your Back”. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/12-12-isabel-phd-prize/ Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/12-12-isabel-phd-prize/ Isabel García-Contreras’s thesis has been awarded a UPM 2020/2021 best PhD thesis award https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/11-29/ Tue, 29 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/11-29/ Unix / Linux shell scripting is ubiquitous, partly due to the simplicity in which it allows combining third-party components (commands) written in any programming language. Unfortunately, this language-agnostic composition hinders automated parallelization, often forcing developers to manually rewrite shell scripts and their third-party components in other languages that support these features. In this talk I will present PaSh, a system for parallelizing Unix/Linux shell scripts. PaSh combines a just-in-time transcompiler that blends static pre-processing with dynamic interposition, a high-level annotation framework for expressing partial command specifications, and a collection of runtime primitives that support the execution of parallel shell scripts. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/11-23-communication-course/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/11-23-communication-course/ Given by The Conversation, the course was divided into five modules that were taught by experts in each subject area. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/11-17/ Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/11-17/ Full-day in-person workshop for researchers https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/11-14-science-week/ Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/11-14-science-week/ XXII Madrid Science and Innovation Week, organized by Madrimasd https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/11-14-acm-ccs/ Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/11-14-acm-ccs/ ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/11-10-prolog-day/ Thu, 10 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/11-10-prolog-day/ IMDEA Software Researchers Manuel Hermenegildo, John Gallagher, and José Francisco Morales participated in the Prolog Day Symposium https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/10-28-patents-for-innovation/ Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/10-28-patents-for-innovation/ An event that aims to become the largest European meeting point for Innovation and Technology Transfer. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/10-25/ Tue, 25 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/10-25/ Vector Commitments allow one to (concisely) commit to a vector of messages so that one can later (concisely) open the commitment at selected locations. In the state of the art of vector commitments, {\em algebraic} constructions have emerged as a particularly useful class, as they enable advanced properties, such as stateless updates, subvector openings and aggregation, that are for example unknown in Merkle-tree-based schemes. In spite of their popularity, algebraic vector commitments remain poorly understood objects. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/10-20-jornada-redimadrid/ Thu, 20 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/10-20-jornada-redimadrid/ This is the first face-to-face edition after the COVID-19 pandemic. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/10-18/ Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/10-18/ Cryptographic accumulators are a common solution to proving information about a large set . They allow to compute a short digest of and short certificates of some of its basic properties, notably membership of an element. Accumulators also allow to track set updates: a new accumulator is obtained by inserting/deleting a given element. In this work we consider the problem of generating membership and update proofs for batches of elements so that we can succinctly prove additional properties of the elements (i. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/10-06-multi/ Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/10-06-multi/ Blockchains are maintained by a network of participants, miner nodes, that run algorithms designed to maintain collectively a distributed machine tolerant to Byzantine attacks. From the point of view of users, blockchains provide the illusion of centralized computers that perform trustable verifiable computations, where all computations are deterministic and the results cannot be manipulated or undone. IMDEA Software researchers Martín Ceresa and César Sánchez publish “Multi: A Formal Playground for Multi-Smart Contract” in which they implement an execution model that allows the study of smart contract interactions. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/10-04/ Tue, 04 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/10-04/ Low-level pointer-manipulating programs are hard to verify, requiring complex spatial program logics that support reasoning about aliasing and separation. Worse, when working over collections, these logics burden the programmer with annotating loops with quantified invariants that describe the contents of the collection. In this talk, I will give a demo of Flux, a static verifier for Rust that shows how logical refinements can work hand in glove with Rust’s ownership mechanisms to yield ergonomic type-based verification for low-level imperative code. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/10-03-european-researchers-night/ Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/10-03-european-researchers-night/ The main theme of this edition was “The 5 EU missions seen by IMDEA researchers”. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-30-anais-thesis/ Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-30-anais-thesis/ The thesis, directed by the Professor Dario Fiore, was presented in September at the ETSIINF of the UPM. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-27-gandalf/ Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-27-gandalf/ Pierre Ganty, Associate Research Professor at IMDEA Software, and Dario Della Monica, Assistant Professor at the University of Udine have co-chaired the event. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/09-27/ Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/09-27/ Programs that deal with heap-allocated inputs are difficult to analyze with symbolic execution (SE). Lazy Initialization (LI) is an approach to SE that deals with heap-allocated inputs by starting SE over a fully symbolic heap, and initializing the inputs’ fields on demand, as the program under analysis accesses them. However, when the program’s assumed precondition has structural constraints over the inputs, operationally captured via repOK routines, LI may produce spurious symbolic structures, making SE traverse infeasible paths and undermining SE’s performance. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-26-setchain-application/ Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-26-setchain-application/ Researchers from IMDEA Software and IMDEA Networks develop an application capable of substantially increasing the number of transactions per minute in blockchains. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-09-david-mateos/ Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-09-david-mateos/ An initiative of the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA). https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-08-sistedes-conference/ Thu, 08 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/09-08-sistedes-conference/ The talk was given in the framework of the XXI Programming and Languages Conference https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/09-07/ Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/09-07/ In this talk we will demonstrate that not only vulnerabilities in exposed services can be dangerous, but also the issue with leaving those services un-configured or with default credentials. We will also touch on the Devops side and talk about left over deployment artifacts that can disclose information and credentials about an infrastructure. In this talk we will demonstrate that not only vulnerabilities in exposed services can be dangerous, but also the issue with leaving those services un-configured or with default credentials. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/07-29-mfoc-end-project/ Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/07-29-mfoc-end-project/ MFOC implements advanced technological products and introduces disruptive changes in the design and verification of complex space systems. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/07-13-jc-ryc-grants/ Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/07-13-jc-ryc-grants/ Thaleia-Dimitra Doudali selected with a Juan de la Cierva-training grant and Marco Guarnieri with a Ramón y Cajal grant. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/07-04-governmental-cookies-paper/ Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/07-04-governmental-cookies-paper/ An international team including researchers from IMDEA Software and IMDEA Networks participates in a study that highlights the need to strengthen user privacy. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/07-01-poster-competition/ Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/07-01-poster-competition/ The IMDEA Software Institute holds for the first time an event aimed at predoctoral researchers to present their work through posters. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/06-17-des/ Fri, 17 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/06-17-des/ More than 14,500 people attended the world’s leading event about digital transformation, held in Malaga https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/06-08/ Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/06-08/ Contents: What threatens our sense of wellness? What does it mean to experience wellness? Sources of anxiety, distress, and toxic stress… in the academic field? Our emotions as a mind-body experience How do our body and mind respond to stress? How can we recover and maintain a sense of wellbeing? What are ways to take care of ourselves in the midst of chaos? Personal Self-care: to know and care for our needs, and boundaries The role of social and emotional support: sense of belonging and community Professional services and supports What types of mental health services are there? https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/06-07/ Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/06-07/ Cloud computing has revolutionized the access to and the use of emerging computing hardware technologies. To achieve efficient resource management and provisioning in cloud environments, we need mechanisms to predict future resource utilization. Cloud resource utilization traces of modern applications and use cases are rather complex and random, rendering traditional time series forecasting methods ineffective. Recently, several machine learning methods are being employed to build more sophisticated prediction models, but fail to provide highly accurate predictions especially for longer windows of time in the future. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/05-31/ Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/05-31/ We study abstraction correspondences between hybrid trajectory semantics for verification and refinement, including discretization and state-based homomorphisms, simulations, bisimulations, preservations with progress, and show that they are all Galois connections. We investigate the problematic composition of hybrid state-based abstractions. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-31-clusters-digitization/ Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-31-clusters-digitization/ The thematic areas of the four innovation spaces will be: Artificial Intelligence, Digital Transformation, Blockchain and Internet of Things. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-27-racoon/ Fri, 27 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-27-racoon/ One of the main challenges faced by cloud databases is to maintain data consistency in the presence of a massive number of modifications. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-26-presentation-skills-workshop/ Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-26-presentation-skills-workshop/ The Assistant Research Professor, Thaleia Doudali, offered to the interns and PhD Students lots of tips and tricks to develop their presentation skills https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/05-26/ Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/05-26/ A fundamental skill throughout the career of a researcher is to effectively present their research, a paper, a poster or a new idea to other researchers, industry, and society. Presentation skills are necessary for Ph.D. candidates to successfully defend their dissertation and for researchers to give engaging talks and effectively pitch their research ideas during conferences, poster sessions, networking events and job interviews. This seminar talk will include advice on how to create engaging presentations, practical tips and tricks on how to structure a slide deck and a poster and practice how to best communicate research ideas. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-25-rechan/ Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-25-rechan/ Regardless of the change, users do want to know what are the differences with respect to the release that have been using so far https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-19-felipe-gorostiaga-thesis-defense/ Thu, 19 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-19-felipe-gorostiaga-thesis-defense/ The defense has been this morning at the UPM’s School of Computer Engineering (ETSIINF) at the Montegancedo Campus. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-17-premio-tfm-david-balbas/ Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/05-17-premio-tfm-david-balbas/ 4th edition of the “I have a project” award of the Institute of Physical and Information Technologies “Leonardo Torres Quevedo” https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/05-17/ Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/05-17/ Smart contracts running on blockchains have been hailed as trustless platforms for carrying out agreements between parties without the risk of interference by the parties themselves or others. The immutability of such agreements is assumed to be a desirable feature, that is until the first bugs appear. In this talk, I will present ongoing work in building runtime verification tools for smart contracts, with a particular focus on recovery from discovered errors. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/05-10/ Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/05-10/ 4.1. Legal concept of software. 4.2. Software created as a collaborative work and as a collective work. 4.3. Software developed at enterprise level. 4.4. Registration of a computer programme 4.5. Metaverse. NFTs. Legal implications from the point of view of the protection of intangible assets. 4.6. Doubts and queries. This course is for IMDEA Software staff only. Also available online via zoom. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/05-06/ Fri, 06 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/05-06/ Spectre vulnerabilities violate our fundamental assumptions about programming abstractions, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data despite previously state-of-the-art countermeasures. To defend against Spectre, developers of verification tools and compiler-based mitigations are forced to reason about low-level hardware details such as speculative execution. I will explain the tradeoffs inherent in formal frameworks for Spectre, the complexity of defense tools, and the resulting security guarantees. I will also propose practical choices for developers of analysis and mitigation tools and identify interesting open problems in this area for future work. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/05-03/ Tue, 03 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/05-03/ 3.1. Precautions when using free and open-source software. 3.2. Procedure for the protection as a trade secret. Generation of electronic evidence. 3.3. Types of technology transfer agreements: licensing agreements, technology integration agreements, resale licensing agreements, codevelopment agreements. 3.4. The exploitation of results in the Horizon Europe 2021-2027 programme. 3.5. Doubts and queries. This course is for IMDEA Software staff only. Also available online via zoom. https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/04-26/ Tue, 26 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/04-26/ 2.1. Patentability requirements. Exclusions. Parts of a patent. 2.2. Computer-implemented inventions (patentable software). 2.3. Protection strategy and territorial scope. 2.4. Extensions and International agreements (European Patent and PCT). 2.5. Artificial intelligence. Patent protection. 2.6. Doubts and queries. This course is for IMDEA Software staff only. Also available online via zoom. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/04-20-digital-signatures/ Wed, 20 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/04-20-digital-signatures/ Digital signatures are widely deployed to authenticate the source of incoming information, or to certify data integrity https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/04-19-2/ Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/transversal-talks/2022/04-19-2/ 1.1. Modalities of Industrial Property (IP) protection. 1.2. Intellectual Property. Differences with Industrial Property. 1.3. What is a Patent? 1.4. What inventions can be protected? 1.5. Why protect by patent? 1.6. Patent holder vs. inventor. Work-related inventions. 1.7. Scientific article vs. Patent. 1.8. Use of information or knowledge contained in patents (or patent applications) of third parties. This course is for IMDEA Software staff only. Also available online via zoom. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/04-19/ Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/04-19/ Proofs of Retrievability (PoRs) are protocols which allow a client to store data remotely and to efficiently ensure, via audits, that the entirety of that data is still intact. A dynamic PoR system also supports efficient retrieval and update of any small portion of the data. We will talk about a new kind of simple protocols for dynamic PoR based on linear algebra. This protocols are designed for practical efficiency, trading decreased persistent storage for increased server computation. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/04-12/ Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2022/04-12/ Cybercriminals often leverage Bitcoin for their illicit activities. In this work, we propose back-and-forth exploration, a novel automated Bitcoin transaction tracing technique to identify cybercrime financial relationships. Given seed addresses belonging to a cybercrime campaign, it outputs a transaction graph, and identifies paths corresponding to relationships between the campaign under study and external services and other cybercrime campaigns. Back-and-forth exploration provides two key contributions. First, it explores both forward and backwards, instead of only forward as done by prior work, enabling the discovery of more addresses and relationships. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/04-06-2/ Wed, 06 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/04-06-2/ Machine learning is a popular tool for building state of the art software systems. It is more and more used also in safety critical areas. This demands for verification techniques ensuring the safety and security of machine learning based solutions. However, in this presentation, we argue that the popularity of machine learning comes from the fact that no formal specification exists which renders traditional verification in appropriate. Instead, validation is typically demanded and we present a recent technique that validates certain correctness properties for an underlying recurrent neural network. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/04-06-1/ Wed, 06 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/04-06-1/ In this talk I will present some initial ideas (a first proposal) on how to define a framework to define missions for autonomous systems which are composed of different “controllers” that need to be active in different contexts. The idea is to try to be as formal as possible, to provide some kind of (semi-)formal reasoning, while being practical. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/04-05-2/ Tue, 05 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/04-05-2/ Dataflow languages have, as well as functional languages, immutable semantics, which is often implemented by copying values. A common compiler optimization known from functional languages involves analyzing which data structures can be modified in-place instead of copying them. In the presentation an algorithm to this so called Aggregate Update Problem for multi-clocked dataflow languages, i.e. those that allow streams to have events at disjoint timestamps, like e.g. Lucid, Lustre and Signal, is presented. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/04-05-1/ Tue, 05 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/04-05-1/ In this talk I will present a paper published at TCC'21 together with Gianluca Brian and Daniele Venturi from Sapienza University of Rome. We study non-malleable secret sharing against joint leakage and joint tampering attacks. Our main result is the first threshold secret sharing scheme in the plain model achieving resilience to noisy-leakage and continuous tampering. The above holds under (necessary) minimal computational assumptions (i.e., the existence of one-to-one one-way functions), and in a model where the adversary commits to a fixed partition of all the shares into non-overlapping subsets of at most t−1 shares (where t is the reconstruction threshold), and subsequently jointly leaks from and tampers with the shares within each partition. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-29-2/ Tue, 29 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-29-2/ Microarchitectural attacks are side/covert channel attacks which enable leakage/communication as a direct result of hardware optimizations. Secure computation on modern hardware thus requires hardware-software contracts which include in their definition of software-visible state any microarchitectural state that can be exposed via microarchitectural attacks. Defining such contracts has become an active area of research. In this talk, we will present leakage containment models (LCMs)—novel axiomatic hardware-software contracts which support formally reasoning about the security guarantees of programs when they run on particular microarchitectures. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-29-1/ Tue, 29 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-29-1/ Secure messaging applications are used by billions of users every day. Applications like WhatsApp make use of the seminal Signal protocol that provides conversation participants with end-to-end encryption guarantees. Due to the long-lived nature of messaging sessions, the threat of state exposure is more pronounced, and thus protocols like Signal regularly refresh keying material. In the cryptographic literature, many works address possible performance/security trade-offs beyond Signal and address additional problems like providing security against bad randomness generators and detecting active attacks. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-24/ Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-24/ In this talk I will touch on two results I achieved during my PhD and Postdoc in the area of logics for algorithmic verification. Integer linear arithmetic, also known as Presburger arithmetic, has been a central subject in computer science for many decades. A celebrated result by Ginsburg and Spanier show that the family of sets definable in Presburger arithmetic coincides with the family of semilinear sets. Despite more than fifty years of work on semilinear sets and several attempts, one question has remained unanswered: how do we efficiently compute the complement of a semilinear set? https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/03-24-madquantum/ Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/03-24-madquantum/ Quantum computing and quantum communications have the potential to become a game changer in computer networks. For this reason, IMDEA Software has undertaken together with seven other partners (IMDEA Networks, Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial, Centro Español de Metrología, Fundación Vithas, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Universidad Complutense de Madrid) a new project funded by the Community of Madrid, the State through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, and the European Union through the NextGeneration EU Funds. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/03-23-sleepy-channels/ Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/03-23-sleepy-channels/ Researchers from the IMDEA Software Institute, TU Wien, Carnegie Mellon University and Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy have presented the first bi-directional Payment Channel compatible with Bitcoin protocol without watchtowers https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/03-18-madqci-presentation/ Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/03-18-madqci-presentation/ Official presentation of the MadQuantum-CM project with the participation of the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Madrid Regional Government. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-16/ Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-16/ Serverless has emerged as the next dominant cloud architecture and paradigm due to its scalability and a flexible billing model. In serverless, developers structure their cloud services as a set of functions connected in a workflow, whereas providers take responsibility for dynamically scaling each function’s resources. This labor division opens opportunities for systems researchers to innovate in serverless computing. However, leading serverless providers, like AWS Lambda, rely on proprietary infrastructure ill-suited for systems research in academia. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-15/ Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-15/ The Cardano blockchain underlies one of the world’s top-ten cryptocurrencies, and supports smart contracts written in Haskell, which work very differently from those on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (the largest smart contract platform). While some vulnerabilities are fixed as a result, it is still possible in principle for large sums to be stolen, or simply lost, due to bugs in smart contracts. Testing smart contracts thoroughly is thus of paramount importance. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-10/ Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-10/ Despite significant efforts on cybersecurity, we are observing an increasing number of attacks in recent years. The reason for this harsh reality is all our efforts aim at individual incidents and there is no deep understanding of attack surfaces in software systems. As a result, software systems are integrated with too many individual patches and ad-hoc mitigations, which introduces unacceptable overhead but not substantial security benefits. In this talk, I will present a systematic approach to understanding attack surfaces. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/03-07-science-fair/ Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/03-07-science-fair/ Four activities were presented as similes of cryptography, blockchain and algorithms used in software research. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-07/ Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/03-07/ Multithreaded concurrency is an extremely challenging programming setting, with bugs manifesting themselves in resource starvation and atomicity violations. While there have been efforts to simplify concurrent programming through higher-level programming abstractions, developers tend to choose low-level concurrent programming abstractions (with locks and condition variables as synchronization primitives) due to efficiency issues. This talk will present my recent work on bridging this efficiency vs. programmability trade-off in concurrent programming by employing lightweight formal methods in the compiler. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/02-28-15-anniversary/ Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/02-28-15-anniversary/ Research is oriented to the needs of Industry and Society. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/02-25/ Fri, 25 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/02-25/ Digital technology creates risks to people’s privacy in ways that did not exist before. I design end-to-end private systems to mitigate these real-world privacy risks. In this talk I will discuss my designs for two applications. These applications highlight key aspects of my work: I analyse security, privacy, and deployment requirements; and address these requirements by designing new cryptographic primitives and system architectures. In the first part of this talk, I will focus on my DP-3T and CrowdNotifier designs for digital proximity and presence tracing that help mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/02-18/ Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/02-18/ We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the generalization error that depend on local statistics of the stochastic gradients evaluated along the path of iterates calculated by SGD. The key factors our bounds depend on are the variance of the gradients (with respect to the data distribution) and the local smoothness of the objective function along the SGD path, and the sensitivity of the loss function to perturbations to the final output. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/02-14-crete/ Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/02-14-crete/ Currently the refinement types do not provide any mathematical proof that verifies the absence of private information leakage https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/02-11-discussion-female-researchers/ Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/02-11-discussion-female-researchers/ Female researchers from IMDEA Software and Computer Science (UPM) talked about their experience during their careers. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/01-25/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/01-25/ Standard hybrid encryption schemes based on the KEM-DEM framework are hard to implement efficiently in a distributed manner while maintaining the CCA security property of the scheme. This is because the DEM needs to be decrypted under the key encapsulated by the KEM, before the whole ciphertext is declared valid. In this paper we present a new variant of the KEM-DEM framework, closely related to Tag-KEMs, which sidesteps this issue. We then present a post-quantum KEM for this framework based on Learning-with-Rounding, which is designed specifically to have fast distributed decryption. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/01-20-redimadrid-genie/ Thu, 20 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/01-20-redimadrid-genie/ REDIMadrid interconnects 16 independent universities and research centers in the city of Madrid, serving over 290,000 users. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/01-18/ Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/01-18/ Consider a distributed protocol whose n processes ensure some (distributed) safety and liveness properties, communicating with each other without synchrony, despite a certain the number t of Byzantine processes. It has been known for decades that such distributed protocols cannot ensure safety as soon as more than a threshold of t_0 processes fail, typically one third of the processes. By contrast, only recently did the community discover that some of these distributed protocols can be made accountable by ensuring that correct processes detect at least t_0 + 1 faulty processes responsible of any safety violation. https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/01-11-niki-vazou-erc/ Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2022/01-11-niki-vazou-erc/ The goal of “Certified Refinement Types” (CRETE) is to design a sound and practical refinement type system. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/01-10/ Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2022/01-10/ We revisit the problem of designing light-client blockchain protocols from the perspective of classical proof-system theory. This results in a framework that allows quantifying the security guarantees provided to a light-client verifier even when interacting only with a single dishonest (full-node) prover. We define a new primitive called succinct non-interactive argument of chain knowledge (SNACK) capturing this intuition and show how augmenting any blockchain with a graph-labeling proof of sequential work (GL-PoSW) enables SNACK proofs for this blockchain. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/12-20-thaleia-interview/ Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/12-20-thaleia-interview/ Her interest in using machine learning for building better software systems came after an internship at AMD Research https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/12-15/ Wed, 15 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/12-15/ The Spectre family of speculative execution attacks have required a rethinking of formal methods for security. Approaches based on operational speculative semantics have made initial inroads towards finding vulnerable code and validating defenses. However, with each new attack grows the amount of microarchitectural detail that has to be integrated into the underlying semantics. We propose an alternative, light-weight and axiomatic approach to specifying speculative semantics that relies on insights from memory models for concurrency. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/12-14/ Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/12-14/ Side-channel analysis is one of the main threats against software and hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms. Among those attacks, the profiling attacks are some of the most powerful though they present some weaknesses such as, for example, the need for synchronization between different execution of the algorithm. Recent years saw the use of deep neural networks to try to solve those weaknesses. Our work focused on trying to better understand the networks and how they make their predictions. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/12-07/ Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/12-07/ Visibility relations have been proposed by Henzinger et al. as an abstraction for proving linearizability of concurrent algorithms that obtains modular and reusable proofs. This is in contrast to the customary approach based on exhibiting the algorithm’s linearization points. In this talk I will show how to apply visibility relations to develop modular proofs for three elegant concurrent snapshot algorithms of Jayanti. The proofs are divided by signatures into components of increasing level of abstraction; the components at higher abstraction levels are shared, i. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/12-01-hrs4r-award/ Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/12-01-hrs4r-award/ As part of its commitment to bring the best research talent to Madrid, the IMDEA Software Institute developed its first action plan in 2021. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/11-30/ Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/11-30/ We provide a simple and efficient in practice algorithm to decide the language inclusion between (nondeterministic) Büchi automata, a PSpace-complete problem. Our approach, like others before, leverage a notion of quasiorder to prune the search for a counterexample by discarding candidates which are subsumed by others for the quasiorder. Discarded candidates are guaranteed to not compromise the completeness of the algorithm. The novelty of our work lies in the quasiorder used to discard candidates. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/11-29-thesis-award-upm/ Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/11-29-thesis-award-upm/ Pepe Vila and Joaquín Arias, two former PhD students of the IMDEA Sofwtare Institute, have won the 2019-2020 Extraordinary Doctoral Thesis Award granted by the Polytechnic University of Madrid. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/11-16/ Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/11-16/ Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies suffer from scalability issues. Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) are the most prominent approach to overcome these issues. The main idea is to reduce the transactions on the blockchain by establishing payment channels between users and allowing any two users connected via a path of channels to perform payments. PCN are already deployed in practice, e.g., the Lightning Network currently has 80k channels, 30k users and 200M USD locked. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/11-11-science-week/ Thu, 11 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/11-11-science-week/ The DG for Research and Technological Innovation and the Director of the Institute opened the event held on the occasion of the Science and Innovation Week. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/11-03-3/ Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/11-03-3/ Many important system properties, particularly in security and privacy, cannot be verified statically. Therefore, runtime verification is an appealing alternative. Logics for hyperproperties, such as HyperLTL, support a rich set of such properties. However, black-box monitoring of HyperLTL is not possible in general. In this talk, I will present an alternative approach called gray-box monitoring which combines runtime verification and static analysis to cover a wider class of hyperproperties. I will start the talk by giving a brief recap of LTL, Hyper-LTL and some basic results about black-box monitoring. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/11-03-2/ Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/11-03-2/ This talk is concerned with the combination of monitoring techniques and reactive synthesis based on temporal logic (LTL). We explore an approach that combines synthesis of declarative specifications in the presence of an existing behaviour model as a monitor, with the benefit of not having to reason about the state space of the monitor. We suggest a formal language (Monitor-Triggered Temporal Logic) with automata monitors as non-repeating and repeating triggers for LTL formulas. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/11-03-1/ Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/11-03-1/ A significant proportion of classes in modern software introduce or use object protocols, prescriptions on the temporal orderings of method calls on objects. In this talk I will introduce a particular abstraction of object protocols (enabledness preserving abstractions, EPAs). We have been using EPAs for validation of specifications and programs featuring rich protocols and more recently for test case generation techniques. During this talk I will focus on using EPA for testing and some initial attempts to validate smart contracts. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/11-02/ Tue, 02 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/11-02/ Refinement types are a type-based, static verification technique designed to be practical. They enrich the types of an existing programming language with logical predicates to specify program properties and automatically validate these specifications using SMT solvers. Refinement types are a promising verification technology that in the last decade has spread to mainstream languages (e.g., Haskell, C, Ruby, Scala, and the ML-family) to verify sophisticated properties of real world applications, e.g., safety of cryptographic protocols, memory and resource usage, and web security. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/10-26/ Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/10-26/ Private Message Detection (PMD) as a new cryptographic primitive has been identified lately. A PMD protocol aims to allow users to efficiently and privately detect and retrieve their recipient-anonymous messages from a public bulletin board or an untrusted server. Such protocols have promising applications in anonymous messaging (e.g., Signal, Niwl) and privacy-preserving payment systems (Zcash, Monero, stealth payments for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other privacy-enhancing overlays). A private but inherently inefficient solution would be downloading all the ciphertexts from the bulletin board or the server. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/10-21-redimadrid/ Thu, 21 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/10-21-redimadrid/ Up to 90 people attended virtually to the XVI edition of the REDIMadrid Conference https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/10-19/ Tue, 19 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/10-19/ Nowadays, computing platforms use a mix of different hardware technologies, as a way to scale application performance, resource capacities and achieve cost effectiveness. However, this heterogeneity, along with the greater irregularity in the behavior of emerging workloads, render existing resource management approaches ineffective. In the first part of this talk, I will describe how we can use machine learning methods at the operating system-level, in order to make smarter resource management decisions and speed up application performance. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/10-19-workshop-informatics-europe/ Tue, 19 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/10-19-workshop-informatics-europe/ The special event will be chaired by Harald Gall, University of Zurich, and Manuel Carro, ETSIINF (UPM) and IMDEA Software Institute. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/09-27-iclp21/ Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/09-27-iclp21/ Manuel Carro, Isabel Garcia-Contreras, Manuel Hermenegildo, Bishoksan Kafle, Pedro Lopez-Garcia, Jose F. Morales, Victor Perez-Carrasco and Miguel A. Sanchez-Ordaz participated by presenting papers, being panelists, PC members, or Session Chairs. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/09-21-cedi-2021/ Tue, 21 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/09-21-cedi-2021/ Manuel Carro, Juan Francisco García, Daniel Jurjo, Fernando Macías, Jose F. Morales y Alessandra Gorla participate https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/09-15-visit-imdea-networks/ Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/09-15-visit-imdea-networks/ IMDEA Networks and IMDEA Software presented their latest research advances to the delegation from the Regional Government of the Community of Madrid https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/08-06-facebook-award/ Fri, 06 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/08-06-facebook-award/ Musard Balliu and Marco Guarnieri are the recipients of a Facebook Research award https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/07-27/ Tue, 27 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/07-27/ The Kleene theorem establishes a fundamental link between automata and expressions over the free monoid. Numerous generalisations of this result exist in the literature. Lifting this result to a weighted setting has been widely studied. Moreover, different monoids can be considered: for instance, two-way automata, and even tree-walking automata, can be described by expressions using the free inverse monoid. In the present work, we aim at combining both research directions and consider weighted extensions of automata and expressions over a class of monoids that we call pre-rational, generalising both the free inverse monoid and graded monoids. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/07-26-isabel-garcia-thesis/ Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/07-26-isabel-garcia-thesis/ Isabel completes her doctoral studies in Artificial Intelligence at UPM, advised by the distinguished professor Manuel Hermenegildo https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/07-21/ Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/07-21/ Automatic static analysis tools allow inferring properties about software without executing it and without the need for human interaction. When these tools are based on formal methods, the properties are guaranteed to hold and come with a mathematical proof. The usage of these tools during the coding, testing, and maintenance phases of the software development cycle helps reduce efforts in terms of time and cost, as they contribute to the early detection of bugs, automatic optimizations, or automatic documentation. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/07-06/ Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/07-06/ Petri nets are a popular and well-studied formal model for the representation and verification of parallel processes. The central problem for Petri nets is reachability: given two configurations of a Petri net, does there exist a run from one to the other. This problem is very difficult: it has recently been proven to be Tower-hard (non-elementary). This motivates the study of subclasses in the hopes of having a more reasonable complexity. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/06-29/ Tue, 29 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/06-29/ Compositionality is a fundamental notion in numerous fields of computer science. This principle can be summarised as follows: Every system should be designed by composing simple parts such that the meaning of the system can be deduced from the meaning of its parts, and how they are combined. For instance, this is a crucial aspect of modern software engineering: a program split into simple modules will be quicker to compile, easier to maintain and allowing concurrency. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/06-29-upm-contest/ Tue, 29 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/06-29-upm-contest/ Both researchers managed to earned the support of the audience by telling briefly and in a non-technical way what their thesis is about. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/06-22/ Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/06-22/ Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE) protocols allow a set of users to elect a leader among them so that the identity of the winner remains secret until she decides to reveal herself. This notion was formalized and implemented in a recent result by Boneh, et al. (ACM Advances on Financial Technology 2020) and finds important applications in the area of Proof of Stake blockchains. In this paper we propose new solutions to the problem that advance the state of the art both from a theoretical and a practical perspective. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/06-18-protocol-bitcoin/ Fri, 18 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/06-18-protocol-bitcoin/ Researchers from the IMDEA Software Institute, TU Wien and Purdue University have developed a protocol that makes more secure and faster transactions in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/06-07-icra-2021/ Mon, 07 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/06-07-icra-2021/ “Assumption Monitoring Using Runtime Verification for UAV Temporal Task Plan Executions” https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/05-26-best-paper-ieee/ Wed, 26 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/05-26-best-paper-ieee/ The paper develops a framework for defining hardware-software contracts that capture hardware side-channel security guarantees in a simple, mechanism-independent manner https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/05-21/ Fri, 21 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/05-21/ The past ten years have seen an increasing presence of deep learning algorithms to perform a diverse set of tasks thanks to advances in technology. A few years ago, those algorithms started to be used to help perform profiled side-channel analysis. Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) is a type of attack against secure algorithms which uses leakages of information contained in physical values, such as the power consumption, in order to retrieve the secret or a part of the secret used during the encryption. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/05-18/ Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/05-18/ Software developers make pervasive use of third-party software supply chains to reduce costs and accelerate release cycles, at a risk to safety and security. I will introduce a series of techniques that exploit module boundaries to automate software compartmentalization and enforce security policies, enhancing safety and security. BreakApp isolates select modules using powerful system-level containment mechanisms. Iris leverages language-based protection to offer finer-grained control and lower performance overheads. Finally, Mir uses a constrained read-write-execute protection model and a hybrid analysis to fully automate compartmentalization. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/05-11/ Tue, 11 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/05-11/ The hardware security crisis brought on by recent speculative execution attacks has shown that it is crucial to adopt a security-conscious approach to architecture research, analyzing the security of promising architectural techniques before they are deployed in hardware. We offer the first security analysis of cache compression, one such promising technique that is likely to appear in future processors. We find that cache compression is insecure because the compressibility of a cache line reveals information about its contents. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/04-22-picocrypt/ Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/04-22-picocrypt/ The PICOCRYPT project, led by the IMDEA Software Institute, will guarantee integrity, privacy and effectiveness of computation on data stored in the cloud https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/04-20/ Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/04-20/ Cramer, Damgård, and Schoenmakers (CDS) built a proof system to demonstrate the possession of subsets of witnesses for a given collection of statements that belong to a prescribed access structure P by composing so-called sigma-protocols for each atomic statement. Their verifier complexity is linear in the size of the monotone span program representation of P. We propose an alternative method for combining sigma-protocols into a single non-interactive system for a compound statement in the random oracle model. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/04-08-ieee-accepted-papers/ Thu, 08 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/04-08-ieee-accepted-papers/ The conference, that will take place from the 23rd to 27th of May, has recently published the list of accepted papers https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/04-06/ Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/04-06/ We study the problem of timed asynchronous decentralized monitoring of stream runtime verification specifications. In decentralized runtime verification, monitors are deployed in a network that provides a (sufficiently) synchronized shared clock. These monitors communicate via an asynchronous network, where messages can take arbitrarily long but cannot be duplicated or lost. This is a communication setting common in many cyber-physical systems like smart buildings, ambient living or Industry 4.0. This kind of network ressembles more closely every day networks. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-25/ Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-25/ Computing platforms increasingly incorporate heterogeneous hardware technologies, as a way to scale application performance, resource capacities and achieve cost effectiveness. However, this heterogeneity, along with the greater irregularity in the behavior of emerging workloads, render existing resource management approaches ineffective. This results in a significant gap between the realized vs. achievable performance and efficiency. My research develops a practical approach for using machine learning to bridge this gap, specifically targeting systems with heterogeneous memory technologies. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-24/ Wed, 24 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-24/ Analyzing large and heterogeneous data is a recurrent problem for analysts and researchers. For example, a dataset of network events may contain, among others, information as diverse as text, IP addresses, numeric and categorical fields, DNS names, log lines from firewalls, and inspection tools. All these data can be correlated in a non-trivial way; additionally, some information may be missing for some events, and the reliability of what is collected may vary. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/03-20-thesis-maximiliano/ Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/03-20-thesis-maximiliano/ The goal of static cost analysis is to automatically estimate the resources used by program executions without running the programs with concrete data, as functions of input data sizes and possibly other (environmental) parameters https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-18/ Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-18/ Nowadays, attackers have large amount of resources (e.g., computational and space capabilities) that are used for malicious purposes, e.g., stealing sensitive information (such as passwords). To face these capacious adversaries, “resource-demanding” functions have been developed: Functions that deliberately consume (on evaluation) large quantities of resources (e.g., time, space, energy). In this talk, I will introduce a new notion of resource-demanding function named verifiable capacity-bound function (VCBF). The main VCBF property is that it imposes a lower bound on the number of bits read from memory during evaluation (referred to as minimum capacity). https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/03-16/ Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/03-16/ Cloud services improve their availability by replicating data across sites in different geographical regions. A variety of state-machine replication protocols have been proposed for this setting that reduce the latency under workloads with low contention. However, when contention increases, these protocols may deliver lower performance than well-known Paxos algorithm. In this talk I will present SwiftPaxos – a protocol that lowers the best-case latency in comparison to Paxos without hurting the worst-case one. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-11/ Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-11/ The blockchain offered a distributed way to provide security guarantees for financial transactions that avoid the single-point failure drawback of centralized approaches. However, this ability comes with the cost of storing a large (distributed) blockchain state and introducing additional computation and communication overheads to all participants. All these drawbacks raise a challenging scalability problem for resource-constrained devices in the blockchain network. Most scaling solutions typically require resource-constrained devices to rely on peers with a higher computational and storage capability. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/03-11-josef-morales-elected-board-member-alp/ Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/03-11-josef-morales-elected-board-member-alp/ ALP Executive Board members are elected by a popular vote within the community among candidates proposed for their contributions and recognition within logic programming https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/03-09/ Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/03-09/ Sensitivity properties describe how changes to the input of a program affect the output, typically by upper bounding the distance between the outputs of two runs by a monotone function of the distance between the corresponding inputs. When programs are probabilistic, the distance between outputs is a distance between distributions. The Kantorovich lifting provides a general way of defining a distance between distributions by lifting the distance of the underlying sample space; by choosing an appropriate distance on the base space, one can recover other usual probabilistic distances, such as the Total Variation distance. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/03-04-alejandro-aguirre-phd/ Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/03-04-alejandro-aguirre-phd/ Relational logics for higher-order effectful programs https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-03/ Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-03/ The pervasiveness of cell phones, mobile applications and social media generates vast amounts of digital traces that can reveal a wide range of human behavior. From mobility patterns to social networks, these signals expose insights about human behaviors and social interactions. In this talk, I will discuss approaches that can help local governments and non-profit organizations understand better the spatial dynamics of cities and communities, offering additional insights beyond more traditional sources of information. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/03-02-visit-sedia-cm/ Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/03-02-visit-sedia-cm/ Fruitful discussions regarding strategies for talent attraction and retention were manteined https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-01/ Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/03-01/ When collecting information, local differential privacy (LDP) relieves users’ privacy concerns, as it adds noise to users’ private information. The LDP technique has been deployed by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Alibaba for data collection. In this talk, I will share our research on the basic primitives for LDP and a system that can handle analytical queries under LDP. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/02-26-niki-vazou-board-haskell-foundation/ Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/02-26-niki-vazou-board-haskell-foundation/ It is the first time the Haskell Foundation decides to create a Board of Directors https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/02-23/ Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2021/02-23/ We present a novel algorithmic framework to decide whether inclusion holds between ω-regular languages of infinite words over a finite alphabet. Our approach relies on a least fixpoint characterization of languages based on ultimately periodic infinite words of type uvω, with u finite prefix and v finite period of the word. Our inclusion checking algorithm, called BAInc, is designed as a complete abstract interpretation that performs a least fixpoint computation on a suitable abstraction of sets of finite words. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-22/ Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-22/ The slowdown in transistor scaling and the end of Moore’s law indicate a need to invest in new computing paradigms; specialized hardware devices, such as FPGAs and ASICs, are a promising solution as they can achieve high processing capabilities and energy efficiency. However, a major barrier to the global success of specialized computing is the difficulty of hardware design. High-level synthesis (HLS) tools generate digital hardware designs from high-level programming languages (e. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-09/ Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-09/ The multi-scale programmability of modern computer systems, including network fabrics and systems-on-chip, presents unprecedented opportunities to build richly-featured, efficient and reliable services. But programming such systems is challenging because of their distributed and heterogeneous nature, which necessitates reasoning about different execution domains and hardware targets, resource scheduling, security, and resilience to partial failure. In this talk I’ll describe Flightplan, a solution to this problem for P4, a domain-specific language for programmable networking. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/02-08-herme-inria-sc/ Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/02-08-herme-inria-sc/ Manuel Hermenegildo, has been appointed for a second three-year term as Chairman of the Scientific Board of INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-08/ Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-08/ Data is eating the world. Systems for storing and processing data, such as Database Management Systems (DBMSs), are thus pivotal for our computing infrastructure. It is critical that they function correctly — incorrectly computed results (e.g., by omitting a row) can cause serious loss or damage. Despite their importance, finding such logic bugs in production DBMSs is a longstanding challenge. This talk presents novel, general approaches to effectively detecting logic bugs in DBMSs by tackling the test oracle problem, i. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-03/ Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-03/ Online services play a major role in our everyday life for communication, entertainment, socializing, e-commerce, etc. These services run inside the datacenter under strict tail-latency service level objectives in order to remain interactive. The emergence of new hardware for IO has enabled microsecond-scale datacenter communications that challenge the efficiency of existing operating system and network mechanisms. Also, new in-network programmable devices start being deployed in datacenters and introduce a new computing paradigm that shifts functionality traditionally performed at the end-points to the network. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/02-01-iet-best-paper-award/ Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/02-01-iet-best-paper-award/ “Multi-Key Homomorphic Authenticators” is the long version of a paper they first published in 2016 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-01/ Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/02-01/ I will talk about two fairly different but representative lines of my work. The first line of work is about reachability analysis of linear dynamical systems. That problem is considered solved from a theoretical point of view because arbitrary-precision algorithms using efficient set representations that scale to hundreds of dimensions are available. However, in many cases we are not interested in high precision but instead want a fast analysis result or need to deal with systems that have thousands of dimensions, to which even the best set representations do not scale. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/01-29/ Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2021/01-29/ Efficient and effective fuzzing requires the availability of the input specification for the program under test. However, such specifications are typically unavailable, obsolete, incomplete, or inaccurate, limiting the reach of fuzzers. This has led to a proliferation of hacky recipes by different fuzzers to get past the input parsing stage, with each recipe working on some but not all programs. That is, fuzzing most resembles alchemy than science at this point. https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/01-28-aepd-award/ Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/01-28-aepd-award/ Parental control applications often misbehave posing privacy threats for children and even parents https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/01-25-platon-kotzias-phd-prize/ Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2021/01-25-platon-kotzias-phd-prize/ “A Systematic Empirical Analysis of Unwanted Software Abuse, Prevalence, Distribution, and Economics” is the thesis title https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/12-15/ Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/12-15/ Reproducibility crisis in science, including computational sciences, is a serious, well-known, and well-documented problem, which demands an outstanding effort from the entire research community to be solved. In order to bridge this aforementioned reproducibility gap, Information Systems (IS) journal has launched a novel reproducibility initiative to allow the exact replication of published results in a fast, reliable, and straightforward manner, which consists in inviting authors to publish reproducible papers providing a detailed reproducibility protocol, together with a supplementary collection of software and data. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/12-09-erc-dario-fiore/ Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/12-09-erc-dario-fiore/ The third ERC awarded to researchers from the IMDEA Software Institute https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/12-02/ Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/12-02/ Group signatures allow user data to be collected while preserving the user’s privacy but still ensuring it originates from a group member. However, the correlation of data by user is useful for processing data. Therefore, the linkability, i.e. whether signatures can be linked by user, must balance utility and privacy. We first introduce a new variant of group signature scheme that provides a more flexible and privacy-friendly form of linkability. When created, all signatures are fully unlinkable, but can be made linkable via an oblivious centrally trusted entity known as the converter. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/12-01/ Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/12-01/ Optimising programs is hard. Not only one must preserve semantics, but also one needs to ensure that an optimisation really makes the program better. The first part, preserving semantics, has been, and still is, the subject of much research. We follow a line of work that starts with Morris’ observational equivalence, continues with Abramsky’s applicative bisimilarity and Howe’s method, and concludes in a recent abstract formalization of applicative bisimilarity in the presence of algebraic effects by Dal Lago, Gavazzo and Levy. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/11-30-popl-21/ Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/11-30-popl-21/ This paper presents a novel, algebraic treatment of the assertion language of separation logics https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/11-24/ Tue, 24 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/11-24/ Vector commitments with subvector openings (SVC) [Lai-Malavolta, Boneh-Bunz-Fisch; CRYPTO’19] allow one to open a committed vector at a set of positions with an opening of size independent of both the vector’s length and the number of opened positions. We continue the study of SVC with two goals in mind: improving their efficiency and making them more suitable to decentralized settings. We address both problems by proposing a new notion for VC that we call incremental aggregation and that allows one to merge openings in a succinct way an unbounded number of times. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/11-20-smart-contracts-tezos/ Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/11-20-smart-contracts-tezos/ The work explores the application of Parametric Resource Analysis to the static inference of gas and storage consumption bounds for smart contracts https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/11-17/ Tue, 17 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/11-17/ What do Apple, the FBI and a Belgian politician have in common? In 2003, in Belgium there was an electronic election and mysteriously one candidate got 4096 extra votes. After counting the total number of voters there was an extra of 4096. An accurate analysis led to the official explanation that a spontaneous creation of a bit in position 13 of the memory of the computer attributed 4096 extra votes to one candidate. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/11-10/ Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/11-10/ In this talk, I will make an introduction to the paradigm of Answer Set Programming (ASP) and its extension for temporal reasoning. In the first part of the talk, we will see the basic propositional semantics under a logical perspective (using Equilibrium Logic) and explain how this logical encoding relates to the most usual logic programming definition of answer sets. We will then review the most frequent features of the ASP language used in practice, presenting several examples that illustrate the use of variables and some frequent constructs like choice rules, aggregates or minimization. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/10-27/ Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/10-27/ Transport Layer Security (TLS) is utilized by several applications to secure network communication through encryption. Malware adoption of TLS is rapidly growing, disabling widespread approaches for detection on-the-wire that require to have access to plain-text contents of network communications to characterize malicious traffic. Due to traffic decryption disrupts privacy for all other types of communication (for instance, by using a Man-in-the-Middle approach), different supervised machine learning based strategies have been developed to build malware detectors directly from TLS metadata. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/10-21-redimadrid-conference/ Wed, 21 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/10-21-redimadrid-conference/ The conference featured 8 interesting presentations, two of them on forthcoming papers, and a colloquium https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/10-14/ Wed, 14 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/10-14/ This talk is scoped for both cryptographers and non-cryptographers. I will start by introducing two of the most active research areas in modern cryptography: secure (multi-party) computation (MPC) and (privacy-preserving) verifiable computation (VC). In MPC protocols, a set of mutually distrusting participants want to jointly compute some function of their choice on their secret data, while keeping their inputs private. In VC, external parties which did not take part in some computation f(x)=y want to make sure that y was indeed computed by applying f to the (potentially hidden) input x. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/10-09-elena-gutierrez-thesis/ Fri, 09 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/10-09-elena-gutierrez-thesis/ A new theoretical perspective on a collection of open problems of classical automata constructions and well-established algorithms https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/10-05-zsolt-book/ Mon, 05 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/10-05-zsolt-book/ Using reconfigurable hardware accelerators to accelerate analytical processing https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/09-10-niki-liquid-haskell-ghc-plugin/ Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/09-10-niki-liquid-haskell-ghc-plugin/ The work was presented at the Haskell Implementors’ Workshop (HIW 2020) in ICFP 2020 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/08-31-quasiorder-perspective-residual-automata/ Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/08-31-quasiorder-perspective-residual-automata/ They present a new residualization operation and a generalized Brzozowski’s method for building the minimal residual automaton for a given language. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/08-28-non-maleable-secret-sharing/ Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/08-28-non-maleable-secret-sharing/ They construct non-malleable secret sharing schemes secure against attackers https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/07-30-pedro-valero-thesis/ Thu, 30 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/07-30-pedro-valero-thesis/ He uses quasiorders on words to offer a new perspective on two well-studied problems from Formal Language Theory https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/07-21/ Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/07-21/ We introduce REST, a rewrite technique for SMT-based verifiers that supports user-defined terminating functions. Our technique builds upon proof-by-logical evaluation (PLE) that decidably encodes user-defined functions as SMT equalities. REST extends PLE to automatically instantiate provably correct rewrite rules. It uses size-change termination to ensure that rewriting does not diverge, preserving predictable verification. We implement REST in Liquid Haskell and use it to automate proof generation. The automation provided by REST sets the ground for further proof tactic development: we used metaprogramming to implement a structural induction tactic. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/07-07/ Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/07-07/ Malware analysis systems are one of the best weapons in the arsenal of cybersecurity companies and researchers. An integral part of such systems is a sandbox providing an instru-mented and isolated environment to run unknown artifacts and observe their behavior to identify potentially malicious actions. In order to avoid detection, attackers have developed numerous techniques to make analysis harder. One class of anti-analysis attacks is based on the observation that it is not only the sandbox that monitors the behavior of the runningprogram; the program itself can also monitor its surrounding environment to detect the presence of a sandbox and try to evade it. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/07-02-pepe-vila-thesis/ Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/07-02-pepe-vila-thesis/ Pepe Vila defended succesfully his PhD thesis advised by Prof. Boris Köpf https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/07-02/ Thu, 02 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/07-02/ Database Management Systems (DBMS) are used ubiquitously for storing and retrieving data. It is critical that they function correctly — incorrectly computed result sets (e.g., by omitting a row) can cause serious loss or damage. We refer to such defects as logic bugs. Despite their importance, finding logic bugs in production DBMS is a longstanding challenge. Existing techniques such as fuzzing and differential testing are ineffective in finding them. We have proposed a set of novel techniques to effectively detect logic bugs by tackling the two core technical issues: generating test queries and constructing test oracles. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/06-23/ Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/06-23/ Permissioned blockchains can offer a mechanism for transacting across several, not necessarily trusting, entities but they are often not reaching high performance due to the cost of the underlying consensus protocols. When deploying these systems in fast networking environments, there is an opportunity for acceleration by considering all available hardware features, such as FPGAs, programmable NICs and switches, to reduce consensus cost. In this talk, I will provide an overview of Permissioned Blockchains, their use of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, and then deconstruct one such protocol with the goal of forecasting the benefits of various acceleration strategies. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/06-22-prize-mutua-universal/ Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/06-22-prize-mutua-universal/ Awarded with the prize for the best innovative practice in health promotion in the category of small and medium enterprises https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/06-16/ Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/06-16/ Getting the deterministic finite-state automaton with the least possible number of states is an essential question in many applications such as text processing, image analysis, program verification and synthesis. Most of the minimization methods that have been proposed in the literature rely on building a partition of the set of states of the input automaton to obtain the minimal deterministic automaton. This is the case of Hopcroft’s and Moore’s algorithm. Another independent method is the classical textbook procedure proposed by Brzozowski. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/06-11-albatross/ Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/06-11-albatross/ Multiparty randomness generation protocols with guaranteed output delivery and public verification https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/06-09-2/ Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/06-09-2/ The POSIX shell is a widely deployed, powerful tool for managing computer systems. The shell is the expert’s control panel, a necessary tool for configuring, compiling, installing, maintaining, and deploying systems. Even though it is powerful, critical infrastructure, the POSIX shell is maligned and misunderstood. Its power and its subtlety are a dangerous combination. We define a formal, mechanized, executable small-step semantics for the POSIX shell, which we call Smoosh. We compared Smoosh against seven other shells that aim for some measure of POSIX compliance (bash, dash, zsh, OSH, mksh, ksh93, and yash). https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/06-09-1/ Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/06-09-1/ Modern graph query engines are gaining momentum, driven by exponentially growing, interconnected data volumes that populate scientific and industrial repositories, as part of the Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web. While successful commercial implementations exist, no standard graph query language has emerged and, despite the mature tools developed in the formal methods community and the security-sensitive applications currently involving graph-shaped data, no principled framework for the reliable evaluation of such queries has been proposed. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/06-01-cachequery-pldi/ Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/06-01-cachequery-pldi/ CacheQuery: Learning Replacement Policies from Hardware Caches has been accepted at PLDI 2020 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/05-04-bbva-collaboration/ Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/05-04-bbva-collaboration/ A key technology to create data-based digital solutions that protect the privacy and security of users’ data. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/04-13/ Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/04-13/ In response to incidents of unintended disclosure and misuse of user data by online services, modern data protection regulations require service providers to restrict their collection, processing, sharing and storage of sensitive user data. However, ensuring compliance with such regulation in today’s complex and rapidly evolving systems is technically challenging. In my research, I have developed practical systems to prevent unintended disclosures and misuse of data in the face of two broad classes of threats: software bugs and misconfiguration, and side channels. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/04-03/ Fri, 03 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/04-03/ Software correctness is becoming an increasingly important concern as our society grows more and more reliant on computer systems. Even the simplest of software errors can have devastating financial or security consequences. How can we find errors in real-world applications? How can we guarantee that such errors don’t exist? To even begin to answer these questions we need a specification: a description of what it means for a piece of code to be correct, stated either explicitly (e. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/03-31/ Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/03-31/ Fully-autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots today are not engineered as rigorously as aircraft, and thus are not as reliable. In fact, these CPS will likely experience more failures in the future, since they will have a cumulative operation time several orders of magnitude more than that of airplanes. Thus, it is essential that we bring the reliability of today’s commercial aircraft systems (“ultra-reliability”) to the next generation of fully-autonomous CPS. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/03-25/ Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/03-25/ Traditionally, the server-side code of websites was written in languages such as PHP or Java for which security issues are well-studied and well-understood. Recently, though, full-stack JavaScript web applications emerged, which have both their client-side and server-side code written in this language. The benefits of such an approach are obvious, e.g., easy knowledge transfer across tiers and uniform usage of tools. However, JavaScript was designed as a scripting language with a thin API and it was expected to run in a tightly-controlled environment, e. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/03-16/ Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/03-16/ Blockchain technologies have rapidly acquired popularity and promise to become one of the pillars of the digital society. They, however, are not immune from open challenges in terms of security, privacy and scalability. First, the complexity of blockchain applications makes their security analysis prohibitive, which may lead to coin losses by honest users. Second, the fundamental requirement of including every single transaction in the blockchain for transparency is at odds with the privacy of transactions and users. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/03-11-pepe-vila-rootedcon/ Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/03-11-pepe-vila-rootedcon/ Last 7th of March the researcher of the IMDEA Sofware Institute was speaker at RootedCON https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/03-05/ Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/03-05/ High-performance multicores providing strong consistency guarantees speculatively reorder memory operations. If a memory reordering is seen by other cores, speculative operations are squashed and re-executed. This talk presents the concept of non-speculative and invisible reordering of memory operations, the foundation on which the ECHO project (an ERC Consolidator Grant) is based on. The talk offers a background about memory-level speculation in current multicores. Then, it shows that, for the case of the load-load reordering, is not necessary to squash and re-execute reordered loads to guarantee the load-load order. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/03-03/ Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/03-03/ To obtain scalability, software model checkers often employ modular analysis techniques that analyze each of the procedures in a program separately. In this context, summaries are used to abstract the behavior of procedures, as relations of their input/output parameters, to analyze any procedure call without inlining or analyzing its body. One key challenge when producing summaries of memory-manipulating programs is to solve the frame problem: determining which memory locations are not changed by a procedure. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/02-25/ Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/02-25/ Program synthesis is often called the “holy grail” of computer science, as it enables users to refrain from error-prone software development process and focus on only analyzing the intended behavior of the system. Thus, program synthesis exhibits its power in automatic generation of intricate and complex parts of a system as well as in repetitive programming tasks, and bringing the power of programming to the average computer user who may not possess sophisticated programming skills. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/02-24/ Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/02-24/ Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in the interest in secure multiparty computation (MPC) and its applications. While much progress has been made concerning its efficiency, many current, efficient protocols are vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks, where a cheating party may prevent the honest parties from learning the output of the computation, whilst remaining anonymous. The security model of identifiable abort aims to prevent these attacks, by allowing honest parties to agree upon the identity of a cheating party, who can then be excluded in the future. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/02-20-mujer-nina-ciencia/ Thu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/02-20-mujer-nina-ciencia/ The 11th of February, on the occasion of the International Day of Woman and Girl in Science https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/02-20/ Thu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/02-20/ In secret sharing a dealer holds a secret and wants to distribute it among several parties in such a way that the individuals do not learn the secret. However, if several of the parties unite their shares they are able to reconstruct the secret. Secret sharing has several applications such as distributed storage and secure multiparty computation. For different applications it is desired to have different properties for the secret sharing scheme used. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/02-18/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/02-18/ This talk will be a rehearsal of my Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2020 paper presentation. I will be presenting our work on Cross-Origin State Inference (COSI) attacks. In a COSI attack, an attacker convinces a victim into visiting an attack web page, which leverages the cross-origin interaction features of the victim’s web browser to infer the victim’s state at a target web site. Multiple instances of COSI attacks have been found in the past under different names such as login detection or access detection attacks. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/02-13/ Thu, 13 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/02-13/ Software is a fundamental pillar of modern scientific research, across all fields and disciplines. However, there is a general lack of adequate means to archive, reference and cite software. In this talk, we will survey the main issues that make this task difficult, ranging from the specificity of the persistent identifiers needed for reproducibility to the complexity of determining software authorship and authority, especially for long running projects, which are needed for proper software attribution and credit. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/02-12-chainreaction/ Wed, 12 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/02-12-chainreaction/ The three awards, sponsored by the Tezos Foundation, ended 11 prize-winning participants https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/02-04/ Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/02-04/ This talk is a combination of what I have learned about grammar-based compression while developing our tool -zearch- for searching on compressed text [1] and what I have learned about LZ77-based compression during my internship at Facebook. We will begin with an introduction to these two paradigms of compression of textual data: Grammar-based and LZ77-based, followed by an explanation of one algorithm from each family: REcursive PAIRing (Grammar) [2] and zstd (LZ77) [3]. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/01-28/ Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2020/01-28/ We show how to infer deterministic cache replacement policies using off-the-shelf automata learning and program synthesis techniques. For this, we construct and chain two abstractions that expose the cache replacement policy of any set in the cache hierarchy as a membership oracle to the learning algorithm, based on timing measurements on a silicon CPU. Our experiments demonstrate an advantage in scope and scalability over prior art and uncover 2 previously undocumented cache replacement policies. https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/01-16-tezos-event/ Thu, 16 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2020/01-16-tezos-event/ A collaboration agreement to conduct research at the highest level in the Institute’s research areas with the aim of contributing to the development of the Tezos ecosystem https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/01-15/ Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/01-15/ The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) is a widely adopted digital signature standard; in particular it is employed to validate bitcoin transactions. In this context, the theft of a secret signing key results in an immediate financial loss, thereby creating a single point of failure. An interesting solution to reduce the risk of key theft is that of sharing the secret signing key among various devices, such that a signature can only be produced if these devices collaborate to jointly produce a signature, thereby distributing the signature protocol. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/01-14/ Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2020/01-14/ Caches have become the prime method for unintended information extraction across logical isolation boundaries. They are widely available on all major CPU platforms and, as a side-channel, caches provide great resolution, making them the most convenient channel for Spectre and Meltdown. As a consequence, several methods to stop cache attacks by detecting them have been proposed. Detection is strongly aided by the fact that observing cache activity of co-resident processes is not possible without altering the cache state and thereby forcing evictions on the observed processes. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-30-cesar-sanchez-elastest/ Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-30-cesar-sanchez-elastest/ The project has been very successful in both academic and in terms of developing the tool https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-27-marco-spectector/ Fri, 27 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-27-marco-spectector/ An automated technique for determining whether programs are vulnerable to a specific class of micro-architectural attacks https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-26-niki-liquid-haskell/ Thu, 26 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-26-niki-liquid-haskell/ The extension is great for ensuring correctness of code, but it can also be used to improve the performance of code https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-20-luca-nizzardo-phd/ Fri, 20 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-20-luca-nizzardo-phd/ “Cryptographic Techniques for the Security of Cloud and Blockchain Systems” is the thesis title https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/12-19/ Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/12-19/ It is well known that various scalability issues affect automated formal verification, and thus some approaches need to be taken to simplify the software under analysis, or the verification problem as a whole. Bounded verification is one of these approaches, that consists of checking the correctness of a program with respect to its formal specification, but limiting the number of iterations that loops may perform, as well as the maximum number of objects involved in program states. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-10-legosnark/ Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-10-legosnark/ The paper was presented at ACM CCS'19 last November in London https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/12-10/ Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/12-10/ CAPTCHA systems have been widely deployed to identify and block fraudulent bot traffic. However, current solutions, such as Google’s reCAPTCHA, often either (i) require additional user actions (e.g., users solving mathematical or image-based puzzles), or (ii) need to send the attestation data back to the server (e.g., user behavioral data, device fingerprints, etc.), thus raising significant privacy concerns. To address both of the above, in this paper we present ZKSENSE: the first zero knowledge proof-based bot detection system, specifically designed for mobile devices. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-04-pedro-valero-results/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-04-pedro-valero-results/ We interviewed the pre-doctoral researcher to ask him about the scientific results of his research https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-04-imdea-energy-visit/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-04-imdea-energy-visit/ The visit takes place to learn about the initiatives against climate change carried out by the Institutes. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/12-03/ Tue, 03 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/12-03/ Some of the recent blockchain proposals, such as Stellar and Ripple, allow for open membership while using quorum-like structures typical for classical Byzantine consensus with closed membership. This is achieved by constructing quorums in a decentralised way: each participant independently chooses whom to trust, and quorums arise from these individual decisions. Unfortunately, the consensus protocols underlying such blockchains are poorly understood, and their correctness has not been rigorously investigated. In this paper we rigorously prove correct the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), with our proof giving insights into the protocol structure and its use of lower-level abstractions. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-02-manuel-bravo-bonus/ Mon, 02 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/12-02-manuel-bravo-bonus/ Bravo has presented this proposal as a paper to “Principles of Distributed Computing 2020” Conference (PODC) https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/11-29-avertis/ Fri, 29 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/11-29-avertis/ The IMDEA Software Institute and the University of Verona organised AVERTIS. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-27/ Wed, 27 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-27/ Embedded software plays a steadily increasing role in all industrial sectors, and in several such sectors software is responsible for functionality impacting the overall system safety and security. As a result an increasing number of companies and projects are required to comply to industry safety standards (CENELEC EN 50128, ECSS-Q-ST-80C, FDA “General Principles of Software Validation”, IEC 61508, IEC 62304, ISO 26262, RTCA DO-178C). In this seminar we will focus on one of the key aspects of such standards: this is the possibility to program in subsets of standardized languages such as “C” or “C++”. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-25/ Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-25/ Model-based testing (MBT) is a systematic way of black-box testing of a system under test (SUT) with respect to behaviour specified in a model. A key concept of MBT is an implementation- or conformance relation: the precise definition of what it means for an SUT to conform to its model. One of the formal theories for MBT uses labelled transition systems (LTS) as models and ‘ioco’ - Input-Output-COnformance, as conformance relation. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-22/ Fri, 22 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-22/ Despite the recent improvements in automatic test case generation, test case generators do not yet handle well programs with complex structured inputs. Random generators struggle to instantiate structured inputs due to the vastness of the solution space. Search-based generators address the problem by steering random selection to coverage target, but fall short of generating inputs that cover program elements whose reachability depends on non trivial input structures. Symbolic executors effectively capture complex dependencies on structured inputs, but fail in generating legal sequences of method calls. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-18/ Mon, 18 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-18/ Post-quantum cryptography is public-key cryptography resistant to future quantum computers. In this talk we will talk about a post-quantum cryptosystem called DME (Double Matrix Exponentiation) based on high degree polynomials on a small number of variables that I have developed (using ideas of Algebraic Geometry), patented and present it to the NIST contest to choose the future post-quantum cryptography standard. I will also present some open questions related with the algebraic cryptanalysis of the scheme DME and the actual state of the NIST process to choose a quantum safe standard. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/11-14-spectector/ Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/11-14-spectector/ The research has been supported by a grant from the Intel Strategic Research Alliance. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/11-11-semana-ciencia/ Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/11-11-semana-ciencia/ An activity aimed at introducing young talents to software research through challenges, games and videos. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/11-05/ Tue, 05 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/11-05/ In this talk I will briefly explain how refinement types can are used for program verification. Refinement types use the modularity of types to reduce program verification into SMT decidable queries. The talk relies on a PLMW@ICFP 30 minutes presentation, so there will be plenty of time for Q&A. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-04/ Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/11-04/ In this position talk we briefly retrace the historic and evolutionary context that led to AI’s results not necessarily being used first and foremost to benefit the public that funded it, nor to necessarily focus on human values and concerns. Next, we discuss how the AI language Constraint Handling Rules -CHR- can promote social responsibility by making it easy to embed principled guidelines into our systems, and we exemplify this idea within an application to enhance voting and decision-making power. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/10-29/ Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/10-29/ Modern software engineering deals with demanding problems that yield large and complex software. The area of Model-Driven Software Engineering tackles this issue by using models during the development process, but it does not address some of the communication problems among different stakeholders. Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSML) aim at involving domain experts with non-technical profiles in that process. DSMLs define concepts with different levels of abstraction, but traditional modelling does not allow enough flexibility to organise them adequately. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/10-22/ Tue, 22 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/10-22/ The general idea of STARKs is to transform a claim on a certain computation to another claim on the low-degreeness of one polynomial. This construction has gained a lot of attention during the past year, leading to several implementations in the wild. During this talk, we will explain how to build a STARK using genSTARK, one of these libraries. We will also share its complexity analysis based on the different parameters involved in Pedersen commitments computation, assuming very little mathematical background. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/10-17-redimadrid-jornada/ Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/10-17-redimadrid-jornada/ The event is a meeting point between research institutions and industry for the exchange of ideas. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/10-16/ Wed, 16 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/10-16/ Multiparty Computation (MPC) protocols allow a set of mutually distrustful parties to compute a program without revealing their private inputs. It has been suggested that MPC can be combined with blockchain systems to achieve two goals: 1. Determine cash distribution according to private inputs; 2. Improve fairness of MPC protocols through financial punishments for misbehaving parties. In this talk, we will present an approach to constructing general purpose MPC protocols that can be efficiently combined with blockchain systems and distributed applications, such as gambling, distributed cryptocurrency exchanges and privacy preserving smart contracts. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/10-15/ Tue, 15 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/10-15/ We present a Bounded Model Checking technique for higher-order programs based on defunctionalization and points-to analysis. The vehicle of our study is a higher-order calculus with general references. Our technique is a symbolic state syntactical translation based on SMT solvers, adapted to a setting where the values passed and stored during computation can be functions of arbitrary order. We prove that our algorithm is sound and provide a prototype implementation with experimental results showcasing its performance. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/10-14/ Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/10-14/ Offchain protocols aim at bypassing the scalability and privacy limitations of classic blockchains by allowing a subset of participants to execute multiple transactions outside the blockchain. While existing solutions like payment networks and factories depend on a complex routing protocol, other solutions simply require participants to build a childchain, a secondary blockchain where their transactions are privately executed. Unfortunately, all childchain solutions assume either synchrony or a trusted execution environment. In this paper we present Platypus, an offchain protocol that requires neither synchony nor a trusted execution environment. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/10-08/ Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/10-08/ We consider the problem of proving in zero knowledge that an element of a public set satisfies a given property without disclosing the element, i.e. that for some u, “u ∈ S and P(u) holds”. This problem arises in many applications (anonymous cryptocurrencies, credentials or whitelists) where, for privacy or anonymity reasons, it is crucial to hide certain data while ensuring properties of such data. We design new modular and efficient constructions for this problem through new commit-and- prove zero-knowledge systems for set membership, i. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/10-02/ Wed, 02 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/10-02/ Replicated data stores provide highly available, low-latency access to data at the expense of consistency, i.e., observers can perceive differences in the state of a system. Storages adopt different strategies to cope with temporary inconsistencies and resolve conflicts among concurrent updates, such as Replicated data types (RDTs). The selected solution impacts on the properties ensured by a store, i.e., on the kind of inconsistencies or anomalies that are allowed to happened and observed by applications. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/10-01-chainreaction/ Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/10-01-chainreaction/ An action that demonstrates the Institute’s and EIT Digital’s commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/09-30-noche-investigadores/ Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/09-30-noche-investigadores/ At least 200 assistants listened to what the Police and the researcher’s had to say about the evidences of this year’s crime scene https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/09-24/ Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/09-24/ We study the problem of decentralized monitoring of stream runtime verification specifications. Decentralized monitoring uses distributed monitors that communicate via a synchronous network, a communication setting common in many cyber-physical systems like automotive CPSs. Previous approaches to decentralized monitoring were restricted to logics like LTL logics that provide Boolean verdicts. We solve here the decentralized monitoring problem for the more general setting of stream runtime verification. Additionally, our solution handles network topologies while previous decentralized monitoring works assumed that every pair of nodes can communicate directly. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/09-17/ Tue, 17 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/09-17/ Modern data stores achieve scalability by partitioning data into shards and fault-tolerance by replicating each shard across several servers. A key component of such systems is a Transaction Certification Service (TCS), which atomically commits a transaction spanning multiple shards. Existing TCS protocols require 2f+1 crash-stop replicas per shard to tolerate f failures. In this work we present atomic commit protocols that require only f+1 replicas and reconfigure the system upon failures using an external reconfiguration service. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/09-10/ Tue, 10 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/09-10/ Transaction commit protocols play a pivotal role in supporting scalability and availability guarantees of today’s large-scale transactional databases. Their theoretical properties are traditionally captured and analysed through Atomic Commitment Problem (ACP), introduced by Gray in the early 70s. Roughly, ACP is concerned with ensuring all-or-nothing (atomicity) semantics for transactions (the ‘A’ in the famous ACID acronym). It is formulated as a one-shot agreement problem in which a single COMMIT or ABORT decision must be output for a given transaction depending on the COMMIT or ABORT votes provided by a collection of fail-prone sites holding the data objects involved in the transaction. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/09-04/ Wed, 04 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/09-04/ Infinite-state systems such as distributed protocols are challenging to verify using interactive theorem provers or automatic verification tools. Of these techniques, deductive verification is highly expressive but requires the user to annotate the system with inductive invariants. To relieve the user from this labor-intensive and challenging task, invariant inference aims to find inductive invariants automatically. Unfortunately, when applied to infinite-state systems such as distributed protocols, existing inference techniques often diverge, which limits their applicability. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/09-03/ Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/09-03/ Proving the linearizability of highly concurrent data structures, such as those using optimistic concurrency control, is a challenging task. The main difficulty is in reasoning about the view of the memory obtained by the threads, because as they execute, threads observe different fragments of memory from different points in time. Until today, every linearizability proof has tackled this challenge from scratch. We present a unifying proof argument for the correctness of unsynchronized traversals, and apply it to prove the linearizability of several highly concurrent search data structures, including an optimistic self-balancing binary search tree, the Lazy List and a lock-free skip list. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/09-02-openqkd-redimadrid/ Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/09-02-openqkd-redimadrid/ The project that will install a test quantum communication infrastructure in several European countries, starts today. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/07-16/ Tue, 16 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/07-16/ Instrumenting programs for performing run-time checking of properties, such as regular shapes, is a common and useful technique that helps programmers detect incorrect program behaviors. This is specially true in dynamic languages such as Prolog. However, such run-time checks inevitably introduce run-time overhead (in execution time, memory, energy, etc.). Several approaches have been proposed for reducing this overhead, such as eliminating the checks that can statically be proved to always succeed, and/or optimizing the way in which the (remaining) checks are performed. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/07-15-sener-mfoc/ Mon, 15 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/07-15-sener-mfoc/ SENER welcomed today the Madrid Regional Minister of Education and Research and the Madrid Director General of Research and Innovation to present the ‘Madrid Flight on Chip’ project. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/07-11-luis-pereira-awards/ Thu, 11 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/07-11-luis-pereira-awards/ NOVA LINCS Researcher, emeritus Professor at DI FCT NOVA, and member of the Board of Trustees and the Scientific Advisory Board of the IMDEA Software Institute https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/07-09/ Tue, 09 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/07-09/ In this talk, I will introduce you to Cross-Origin State Inference (COSI) attacks. In a COSI attack, an attacker convinces a victim into visiting an attack web page, which leverages the cross-origin interaction features of the victim’s web browser to infer the victim’s state at a target web site. COSI attacks can be leveraged to mount several privacy attacks on web users including determining whether the victim has an account or is the administrator of a prohibited web site, determining if the victim owns sensitive content hosted at a target web site, and identifying whether the victim is the owner of a specific account. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/07-02/ Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/07-02/ Trusted hardware is one of the most complex and desired components of modern computers. For example, almost all mobile phones are equipped with a TEE (Trusted-Execution-Environment) as well as modern x86 computers (SGX). Apparently, (almost) no one is claiming to use such technology in production, because it looks like its foundations are still too shaky. An example of problems that can undermine trusted hardware are vulnerabilities like Foreshadow on Intel platforms or CVE-2018-14491 on Qualcomm based devices (phones, tablets). https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/06-18/ Tue, 18 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/06-18/ Transient resources—resources with transient availability offered by cloud providers at a discounted price—present an opportunity to reduce operational costs of running jobs in the cloud. Unfortunately, there are key problems that emerge when one attempts to use transient resources to reduce the cost of running time-constrained jobs in the cloud. Previous works fail to address these problems and are either not able to offer significant savings or miss termination deadlines. First, the fact that transient resources can be evicted, requiring the job to be re-started (even if not from scratch) may lead provisioning policies to fall-back to expensive on-demand configurations more often than desirable, or even to miss deadlines. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/06-14/ Fri, 14 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/06-14/ In this talk, I will present tail-call optimisation in a functional programming language in the presence of multiple evaluation orders (strict, lazy, call-by-name semantics). The source language, similar to Haskell, is transformed to a low-level, minimal, first-order functional language with non-strict semantics, lazy evaluation and lazy structured data as well as strictness annotations. To find opportunities for optimisation, I performed a static analysis on the low-level functional language, to spot tail-call positions. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/06-12/ Wed, 12 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/06-12/ Distributed protocols such as Paxos play an important role in many computer systems. Therefore, a bug in a distributed protocol may have tremendous effects. Accordingly, a lot of effort has been invested in verifying such protocols. However, due to the infinite state space (e.g., unbounded number of nodes, messages) and protocols complexity, verification is both undecidable and hard in practice. I will describe a deductive approach for verification of distributed protocols, based on decidable fragments of first-order logic, inductive invariants and user interaction. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/06-11-demo-lucas-and-zsolt/ Tue, 11 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/06-11-demo-lucas-and-zsolt/ Lucas Kuhring and Zsolt István will present the demo at the 45th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB'19) in Los Angeles, USA https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/06-06-annual-report-2018/ Thu, 06 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/06-06-annual-report-2018/ This edition updates relevant content, modifies design and estructure, and also includes three research highlights https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/05-28/ Tue, 28 May 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/05-28/ I’ll present a study of the rate for continuously non-malleable codes. Such codes allow to encode a message in a way that continuous tampering attacks on the codeword yield a decoded value that is unrelated to the original message. The results are: • For the case of bit-wise independent tampering, we establish the existence of rate-one continuously non-malleable codes with information-theoretic security, in the plain model. • For the case of split-state tampering, we establish the existence of rate-one continuously non-malleable codes with computational security, in the (non-programmable) random oracle model. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/05-21/ Tue, 21 May 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/05-21/ Everyone has heard about quantum computers and that they will compromise the current Internet security. Quantum computers use q-bits instead of the classical bits and, therefore, can represent an exponential number of states at once (this is called quantum superposition). But, what does that mean? Why some algorithms are dramatically speeded up in this paradigm? Are these computers really as powerful as the media makes us think? In the first talk driven by two speakers (to the best of our knowledge) in the history of the IMDEA S4 (Spring Software Seminar Series), we will give an overview on the model of quantum computation and its principles, focusing on Shor’s algorithm for integer factorization. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/05-16/ Thu, 16 May 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/05-16/ Many micro-architectural attacks rely on the capability of an attacker to efficiently find small eviction sets: groups of virtual addresses that map to the same cache set. This capability has become a decisive primitive for cache sidechannel, rowhammer, and speculative execution attacks. Despite their importance, algorithms for finding small eviction sets have not been systematically studied in the literature. In this paper, we perform such a systematic study. We begin by formalizing the problem and analyzing the probability that a set of random virtual addresses is an eviction set. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/05-14/ Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/05-14/ Even though there have been a large number of proposals to accelerate databases using specialized hardware, often the opinion of the community is pessimistic: the performance and energy efficiency benefits of specialization are seen to be outweighed by the limitations of the proposed solutions and the additional complexity of including specialized hardware, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), in servers. Recently, however, as an effect of stagnating CPU performance, server architectures started to incorporate various programmable hardware and the availability of such components brings opportunities to databases. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-30/ Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-30/ In this talk, we introduce proof-relevant resolution, a framework for constructive proof automation. The intended application of the framework is verifiable proof automation in strongly typed programming languages. We motivate the framework by two use-cases that show its strengths. First, we show a proof-relevant approach to type inference and term synthesis. Secondly, we demonstrate the use of the framework for the purpose of study semantical properties of programming languages, namely soundness of type-class elaboration. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-26/ Fri, 26 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-26/ Secure multiparty computation studies deals with privacy-preserving computation, where several parties, some of them holding private inputs, want to collaborate in computing some function depending on them while at the same time avoiding to reveal more information about these inputs that it is necessary to perform the computation. Some of the most popular ways of performing secure computation involve the notion of secret sharing. The problem however is that secret-sharing based secure computation protocols require to represent the function to be computed as a arithmetic circuit over a large finite field, which for certain functions is not the most natural representation. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-25/ Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-25/ In this talk, I will present pretend synchrony, a new approach to verifying distributed systems, based on the observation that while distributed programs must execute asynchronously, we can often soundly treat them as if they were synchronous, when verifying their correctness. To do so, we compute a synchronization, a semantically equivalent program where all sends, receives, and message buffers, have been replaced by simple assignments, yielding a program that can be verified using Floyd-Hoare style verification conditions and SMT. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-24/ Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-24/ Modern CPUs employ speculative execution to avoid expensive pipeline stalls by predicting the outcome of branching (and other) decisions and speculatively executing the corresponding instructions. Attackers can exploit speculative execution’s side effects to leak sensitive information and violate confidentiality. The family of Spectre attacks demonstrates that this vulnerability affects all modern general-purpose CPUs and poses a serious threat against platforms with multiple tenants. Since the advent of Spectre, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-23/ Tue, 23 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-23/ The practical successes of Machine Learning (ML) in different settings motivates the ability of computing small explanations for predictions made. Small explanations are generally accepted as easier for human decision makers to understand. Existing work on computing explanations is based on heuristic approaches, providing no guarantees of quality, in terms of how close such solutions are from cardinality- or subset-minimal explanations. This talk describes a novel constraint-agnostic approach for computing explanations for any Machine Learning (ML) model. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/04-16/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/04-16/ Fuzzing has become a very interesting technique for finding bugs in computer programs. Since a few years back there is always at least one fuzzing paper in each big conference in systems security. In the industry is also a significant component of the software development cycle. In big companies like Google or Facebook fuzzing is used extensively across their products, like Chrome or Hack. In this talk I present the problem of fuzzing targets with complex inputs like compilers and interpreters. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-15/ Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-15/ Many artifacts that software developers produce are written in natural language: code comments, commit messages, text in user interfaces, privacy policies, high-level description of the system, and so on. In this talk I will present my research work on using natural language processing (nlp) techniques to analyze such artifacts. We infer useful information such as pre- and post-conditions of procedures, and we use it to automatically generate test oracles. In this talk, I will give an overview of my recent contributions on using nlp to make software systems more reliable and trustworthy, together with my plans for the future. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-10-1/ Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-10-1/ Etherum smart contracts written in higher level programming languages like Solidity or Viper are compiled to bytecode, which is executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Any instruction executed on the EVM has a monetary cost. In this talk, I present our tool that automatically optimizes EVM bytecode. Our EVM Bytecode SuperOptimizer ebso implements (unbounded) superoptimization, which relies on an SMT solver to guarantee correctness of the transformation. We then perform a large scale evaluation of ebso on contracts deployed on the Etherum Blockchain. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-10-2/ Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-10-2/ Verifying a program consist of proving that a given program meets its specification. Various frameworks have been studied to provide such specifications, for instance in Hoare logic programs are specified with pairs of pre/post-conditions. When dealing with programs mixing a variety of side-effects such as mutability, divergence, raising exceptions, or non-determinism, providing a framework for specifying those programs becomes challenging. Computational monads are a convenient algebraic gadget to uniformly represent a wide class of such side effects in programming languages. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-08/ Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-08/ Fabric is a modular and extensible open-source system for deploying and operating permissioned blockchains and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by the Linux Foundation (www.hyperledger.org). Fabric supports modular consensus protocols, which allows the system to be tailored to particular use cases and trust models. Fabric is also the first blockchain system that runs distributed applications written in standard, general-purpose programming languages, without systemic dependency on a native cryptocurrency. This stands in sharp contrast to existing blockchain platforms that require “smart-contracts” to be written in domain-specific languages or rely on a cryptocurrency. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/04-08-rootedcon/ Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/04-08-rootedcon/ The pre-doctoral researcher Pepe Vila assists as a speaker to the most important security event in Spain https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-05/ Fri, 05 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-05/ Few technological advances have affected as many aspects of science, economy, and society in general as the ability to collect, analyze, and understand large amounts of data. Data analytics systems play an important role in this development as they translate the exponential performance improvements made by hardware into similar improvements at higher abstraction levels. As one example, I will present a thorough study of a core database primitive, grouping with aggregation, done in the context of a commercial system for relational in-memory processing. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-04/ Thu, 04 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/04-04/ For decades, programmers have interacted with persistent storage via a well-defined block-based API, namely, that of the file system. However, it is expected that byte-addressable nonvolatile memory (NVM) will soon be commonplace, potentially transforming main memory into a storage device. This transition forces fundamental changes in how to reason about and manage persistent storage. The possibility that programmers may wish for data in main memory to survive program runs and even system crashes suggests the need to reassess design decisions at all levels of the system stack. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/04-02-madrid-science-fair/ Tue, 02 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0200 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/04-02-madrid-science-fair/ Interesting activities dedicated to show visitors the research done by the Institutes. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-26/ Tue, 26 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-26/ Modern-day software is increasingly complex and software engineering is commonly accepted as a challenging, error-prone task. Consequently, software bugs are prevalent, incurring detrimental financial costs and often risking human lives. Program analyses provide rigorous and effective means to automated bug detection, and are becoming an integral part of the software development process. In this talk, I will present recent algorithmic advances in two impactful domains of program analysis: (i) static analysis and (ii) stateless model checking. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/03-25/ Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/03-25/ Starting from one of the most celebrated undecidable problem in CS, the Halting Problem, and using reductions as a bridge to show that one problem is at least as difficult to solve as other hard problem, I will gradually achieve the goal of this presentation: proving the undecidability of a collection of problems on the theory of context-free languages. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-22/ Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-22/ The metatheory of the Scala core type system (DOT), first established recently, is still hard to extend, like other systems combining subtyping and forms of dependent types. Soundness of important Scala features remains an open problem in theory and in practice. To obtain a more extensible metatheory, in ongoing work we prove in Coq soundness of DOT semantically. This is challenging, because in DOT variables can be in scope in their own type, objects can define mutually recursive and impredicative type members, and can contain evidence of subtyping relations that must be sound. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-21/ Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-21/ Security often fails in practice due to a lack of understanding of the nuances in real-world systems. For example, users choose weak passwords to deal with the several usability issues with passwords, which in turn degrades the security of passwords. I will talk about how we can build better security mechanisms by combining methodical empiricism with analytical frameworks. First, in the context of passwords, I will show how to improve the usability of passwords by allowing users to log in with typos in their passwords. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-19/ Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-19/ Liquid Haskell is an extension to the type system of Haskell that supports formal reasoning about program correctness by encoding logical properties as refinement types. In this interactive talk, I demonstrate how Liquid Haskell can also be used to reason about program efficiency in the same setting, with the system’s existing verification machinery being used to ensure that the results are both meaningful and precise. My experience is that reasoning about efficiency in Liquid Haskell is often just as simple as reasoning about correctness, and even that the two can coincide. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/03-18-accord/ Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/03-18-accord/ The project sets out to improve blockchain systems that target Business to Business use cases https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-14/ Thu, 14 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/03-14/ Today’s online services must meet strict availability and performance requirements. State machine replication, one of the most fundamental approaches to increasing the availability of services without sacrificing strong consistency, provides configurable availability but limited performance scalability. Scalable State Machine Replication (S-SMR) achieves scalable performance by partitioning the service state and coordinating the ordering and execution of commands. While S-SMR scales the performance of single-partition commands with the number of deployed partitions, it relies on atomic multicast and can present higher latency than traditional SMR, specially when executing multi-partition commands. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/03-05/ Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/03-05/ We all love eating pizza, but we don’t love so much using a fork and a knife for that. The problem is that the moment we pick up a slice of pizza with our hand, it tends to flop over and dangles from our fingers. Luckily, we have a solution: we just need to fold the slice along the bisection (making the shape of an U), that way the slice of pizza won’t bend down. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/02-26/ Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/02-26/ We study the language inclusion problem L1 ⊆ L2 where L1 is regular or context-free. Our approach relies on abstract interpretation and checks whether an overapproximating abstraction of L1, obtained by successively overapproximating the Kleene iterates of its least fixpoint characterization, is included in L2. We show that a language inclusion problem is decidable whenever this overapproximating abstraction satisfies a completeness condition (i.e. its loss of precision causes no false alarm) and prevents infinite ascending chains (i. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/02-19/ Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/02-19/ Since the advent of Spectre, a number of countermeasures have been proposed and deployed. Rigorously reasoning about their effectiveness, however, requires a well-defined notion of security against speculative execution attacks, which has been missing until now. We present a novel, principled approach for reasoning about software defenses against Spectre-style attacks. Our approach builds on speculative non-interference, the first semantic notion of security against speculative execution attacks. We develop Spectector, an algorithm based on symbolic execution for automatically proving speculative non-interference, or detecting violations. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/02-12/ Tue, 12 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/02-12/ Enterprises own a significant fraction of the hosts connected to the Internet and possess valuable assets, such as financial data and intellectual property, which may be targeted by attackers. They suffer attacks that exploit unpatched hosts and install malware, resulting in breaches that may cost millions in damages. Despite the scale of this phenomenon, the threat and vulnerability landscape of enterprises remains under-studied. The security posture of enterprises remains unclear, and it’s unknown whether enterprises are indeed more secure than consumer hosts. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/02-08-jornada-mujer-en-la-ciencia/ Fri, 08 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/02-08-jornada-mujer-en-la-ciencia/ Organized by the UPM, through the Cajal Blue Brain Project and the Ontology Engineering Group, and the IMDEA Software Institute. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/02-07/ Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/02-07/ Are you tired of having to reveal the solution to your sudoku in order to convince others that you have solved it? Are you sick of not being believed when you know a secret? Are you embarrassed about your id card picture and having to expose it every time you need to prove your identity? For the third: Sorry… For the former two: Here they come! Zero-Knowledge proof systems! A ZK proof system allows a party (the prover) to convince another party (the verifier) about the validity of certain statement, without revealing any other additional information, e. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/02-05-bloques/ Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/02-05-bloques/ The Research Group aim to address major challenges of systems based on blockchains and smart contracts https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/01-29/ Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2019/01-29/ In this talk we’ll discuss the impact of CSS (or stylesheet) injection attacks on web security https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/01-21/ Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/01-21/ Parsing is sometimes thought of as a solved problem. However, recent advances show that there is still much to be discovered in this area. This talk reviews two such advances: indentation-sensitive parsing and disambiguation via tree automata. Several popular languages, such as Haskell, Python, and F#, use the indentation and layout of code as part of their syntax. Parsers for these languages currently use ad hoc techniques to handle layout. This talk presents a simple extension to context-free grammars that can express these layout rules, and derives GLR and LR(k) algorithms for parsing these grammars. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/01-18/ Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/01-18/ Decision trees with hard decision nodes stand apart from other machine learning models in their interpretability, fast inference and automatic feature selection – in addition to their ability to handle naturally nonlinear data, multiclass classification and regression, discontinuous predictor functions, and discrete input features. This has made decision trees widespread in certain practical applications for decades, in spite of the fact that their predictive accuracy is generally considered inferior to that of other models. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/01-16-popl-distinguished/ Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/01-16-popl-distinguished/ Roberto Giacobazzi, one of the authors of the winner paper “A²I: Abstract² Interpretation”. https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/01-15-mcarro-round-table/ Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2019/01-15-mcarro-round-table/ Manuel Carro will take part in the round table about research and innovation in Madrid. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/01-11/ Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2019/01-11/ Security auditing, i.e., the examination of the source code for the purpose of detecting vulnerabilities, helps to detect vulnerabilities during the early phases of software development. When performed manually, this task can be laborious, error-prone and does not scale to large software systems. Over the course of the last years, a lot of research has been done with regard to approaches in the areas of Static Analysis, Symbolic Execution and Constraint Solving which aim to make security auditing more effective and cost-efficient. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2018/12-19/ Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2018/12-19/ Based on a condensed version of the RuleML 2018’s tutorial, the talk will recap the relationship between logic and legal contracts, followed by the introduction of Logical Production Systems and their current Prolog and JavaScript based implementations, including considerations regarding use in smart contracts. https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2018/12-18/ Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2018/12-18/ Aggregates are used to compute single pieces of information from separate data items, such as records in a database or answers to a query to a logic program. The maximum and minimum are well-known examples of aggregates. The computation of aggregates in Prolog or variant-based tabling can loop even if the aggregate at hand can be finitely determined. When answer subsumption or mode-directed tabling is used, termination improves, but the behavior observed in existing proposals is not consistent. https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2018/12-14/ Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/invited-talks/2018/12-14/ Concurrent separation logics have had great success reasoning about concurrent data structures. This success stems from their application of modularity on multiple levels, leading to proofs that are decomposed according to program structure, program state, and individual threads. Despite these advances, it remains difficult to achieve proof reuse across different data structure implementations. For the large class of search structures, we demonstrate how one can achieve further proof modularity by decoupling the proof of thread safety from the proof of structural integrity. https://software.imdea.org/news/2018/12-13-innovatech-ws/ Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/news/2018/12-13-innovatech-ws/ UPM’s 6th Technology Innovation workshop took place at the IMDEA Software Institute. As part of its commitment to empower technology advance and innovation, the IMDEA Software Institute collaborated in the organization of UPM’s yearly workshop. The workshop feature keynote speakers and a showcase of some of the best ideas presented to the Innovatech Challenge, as well as the award ceremony for the winners of the contest of ideas. Link https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2018/12-11/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100 https://software.imdea.org/events/software-seminars/2018/12-11/ Some of the recent blockchain proposals, such as Stellar and Ripple, use quorum-like structures typical for Byzantine consensus while allowing for open membership. This is achieved by constructing quorums in a decentralised way: each participant independently chooses whom to trust, and quorums arise from these individual decisions. Unfortunately, the theoretical foundations underlying such blockchains have not been thoroughly investigated. To close this gap, in this work we study decentralised quorum construction by means of federated Byzantine quorum systems, used by Stellar.