Mads Dam: Available degree projects

  1. Formal verification of the secure boot feature in a mobile trusted module. Project on modelling and verifying part of a mobile code platform for mobile phones using a theorem prover. Here is a draft project description. Company: Ericsson Research.
  2. Representing compositional Owicki-Gries in VCPT. VCPT is a theorem proving tool to formulate and prove very general program properties. The tool can be instantiated to different programming languages by means of an operational semantics. Owicki-Gries is an extension of Hoare logic to parallel imperative languages. The task is to use an operational semantics of a suitable parallel while language represented in VCPT to derive a compositional version of the Owicki-Gries proof system, and to validate the representation both theoretically and practically, by example program verifications.
  3. The POPLmark challenge in VCPT. The POPLmark challenge was very recently posed as a challenge for mechanized reasoning in the context of programming language. The challenge itself consists of a number of generic theorems to be proved about a certain typed language (featuring variables at both value and type levels, for connoisseurs it is actually a typed lambda-calculus). We have reasons to believe that VCPT would be well-suited for this kind of task. A suitable (high) level of ambition would be to address just the first problem.
  4. Distributed aggregation tree protocols. Here is a project proposal in collaboration with Rolf Stadler at S3.
  5. Security protocol verification. In the advanced formal methods course we devote some energy to verification of security protocols and the applied pi-calculus. One suggestion is to try to verify some aspects of the SET electronic payment protocol suite using applied pi. The SET suite is huge, so only a small part would be considered in the project. Prior work to process the SET specification and extract formal specifications has been done by groups in Trento and Cambridge using the Isabelle theorem prover. This work would provide the starting point for this project. 

Last revised: 071022, Mads Dam