About me
I’m a PhD candidate at DistriNet at KU Leuven, working on verification techniques for heap-manipulating programs and supervised by Bart Jacobs. My overall goal is to simplify program verification. 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. My general research interests are:
| Program Verification | Automated Reasoning |
| Separation Logic | Bounded & Unbounded Proofs |
| Programming Languages | Type Systems |
| Static Analysis | Natural Language Processing |
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:
Ghost Signals: Verifying Termination of Busy Waiting, CAV 2021
[Paper] [Extended Version] [TR] [Bibtex]A Separation Logic to Verify Termination of Busy-Waiting for Abrupt Program Exit, FTfJP 2020
[Paper] [TR] [Bibtex] [Slides]
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.