About me

I’m a postdoc and software verification expert at DistriNet, KU Leuven working on verification techniques for imperative, heap-manipulating programs. My overall goal is to simplify program verification. I recently completed my PhD on liveness verification and completeness thresholds under the supervision of Bart Jacobs.

Dissertation

Semi-Automated Modular Formal Verification of Critical Software: Liveness and Completeness Thresholds, KU Leuven 2024
[Lirias (KU Leuven)] [arXiv]

Completeness Thresholds

My current research focuses on completeness thresholds for memory safety proofs. The goal of this work is to reduce unbounded memory safety proofs to bounded ones.

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Research Interests

My general research interests are:

Program VerificationAutomated Reasoning
Separation LogicBounded & Unbounded Proofs
Programming LanguagesType Systems
Static AnalysisReversible Programming

AWS

In autumn 2022 and summer 2021, I worked as applied scientist intern with Mark Tuttle in the Automated Reasoning Group at Amazon Web Services.

During my 2022 internship I verified the multicore implementation of the FreeRTOS scheduler, identified a buffer underflow, proposed a fix and proved that it works.

FreeRTOS is a state-of-the-art real-time operating system for embedded systems that runs on many IoT devices. Originally it had been developed for single-core platforms and is currently being ported to multi-core. Using VeriFast, a deductive verifier for C based on separation logic, I proved the scheduler to be memory and thread safe, once my fix has been applied. The proof is an unbounded proof, that is, the provided guarantees hold for all possible interleavings and no matter how big the involved data structures are.

During my 2021 internship I explored ways to progress from bounded to unbounded verification. My research focused on (automatic) memory safety proofs for heap-manipulating programs that involve inductive data structures. I worked on separation-logic based deductive verification as well as on a research prototype that’s based on a mixture of automatic axiom instantiation and term rewriting.

Liveness

During my previous research project, I developed a separation logic to verify liveness properties of concurrent programs:

Before my PhD

Before I joined DistriNet, I obtained my Master’s degree from TU Darmstadt. During my Master’s I worked as student research assistant at the Software Technology Group on type systems for multitier-languages such as ScalaLoci.