Synthesis of Safe Pointer-Manipulating Programs (Nadia Polikarpova, UCSD)

Abstract: Low-level pointer-manipulating programs form the backbone of our digital infrastructure. Unfortunately, they are susceptible to memory safety bugs, such as buffer overflows and use-after-free, which lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities. A promising approach to eliminating memory safety bugs is to use program synthesis technology to generate provably safe low-level code automatically from high-level specifications. In this talk I will present a program synthesizer SuSLik, which accepts a logical specification as input, and produces a provably safe C program as output. SuSLik is the first synthesizer capable of generating a wide range of operations on linked data structures (such as singly- and doubly-linked lists, sorted lists, and trees) without additional hints form the user. To make this possible, SuSLik relies on a novel proof system—synthetic separation logic—to derive correct-by-construction programs directly from their specifications. Bio: Nadia Polikarpova is an assistant professor at CSE, and a member of the Programming Systems group. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zurich in 2014. She then spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Dr. Polikarpova's work spans the areas of programming languages and formal methods; in particular, she is interested in building practical tools and techniques that make it easier for programmers to construct secure and reliable software. Coffee and cookies will be available.