The Laboratoire Méthodes Formelles (LMF) was founded on 1 January 2021 as a joint research centre of University Paris-Saclay, CNRS, ENS Paris-Saclay, Inria, and CentraleSupélec with a main focus on formal methods. The new laboratory combines the expertise of about 100 members from the former Laboratoire Spécification et Vérification (LSV) and the VALS team of Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique (LRI).

In our mission to enlighten the digital world through Mathematical Logic, we rely on formal methods as a tool to analyse, model, and reason about computing systems, such as computer programs, security protocols, and hardware designs. Our research targets a wide range of computational paradigms, from classical to emerging ones such as biological and quantum computing.

LMF is structured around three hubs: Proofs and Models, which lie at the heart of our historical background, and Interactions, that is aimed at fostering cross-fertilisation between formal methods and other domains in computing science and beyond.

Aliaume Lopez received the 2024 E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize for his thesis First Order Preservation Theorems in Finite Model Theory : Locality, Topology, and Limit Constructions.

The prize, named in honor of the Dutch mathematician Evert Willem Beth, was established in 1998 by the Association for Logic, Language, and Information (FoLLI) and is awarded annually for outstanding dissertations in the fields of Logic, Language, and Information.

Aliaume prepared his thesis under the joint supervision of Jean Goubault-Larrecq at LSV, then LMF, and of Sylvain Schmitz at IRIF.

Generic Bidirectional Typing in a Logical Framework for Dependent Type Theories

Sep 18 15:00 ₂₀₂₄

Wednesday 18 September 2024, at 15h

ENS Paris-Saclay, room 1Z18, Zoom link

The current version of the manuscript can be found here.

Abstract.

Dependent type theories are formal systems that can be used both as programming languages and for the formalization of mathematics, and constitute the foundation of popular proof assistants such as Coq and Agda. In order to unify their study, Logical Frameworks (LFs) provide a unified meta-language for defining such theories in which various universal notions are built in by default and metatheorems can be proven in a theory-independent way. Read more...

Toutes nos félicitations à Gaspard Fougea pour le prix du jury reçu à la finale Université Paris-Saclay du concours Ma thèse en 180 secondes.

Gaspard prépare sa thèse « Modèles formels pour la conscience : de l’expérience subjective aux algorithmes cognitifs » au LMF sous la direction d'Alain Finkel et Stéphane le Roux.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYZ5LvZieOA

Xavier Denis, ancien doctorant du LMF, encadré par Jacques-Henri Jourdan et Claude Marché, a reçu le prix de thèse du GdR Génie de la Programmation et Logiciel, décerné mardi 5 juin lors des journées nationales du GdR.

Sa thèse est intitulée Deductive Verification for Rust Programs. Félicitations à Xavier pour son excellent travail !

Plus d'informations sur le site du GdR.

Congratulations to Jacques-Henri Jourdan and his co-authors who will receive the 2023 Alonzo Church Award for their outstanding contributions to Logic and computation with the design and implementation of Iris, a higher-order concurrent separation logic framework. The Award will be presented at the 50th EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2023, in July.

Iris has been widely used in academia, and also in industry, e.g., by engineers at Meta to verify the core components of an interprocess communication system for a new operating system.

Read more...

Hubert Comon-Lundh received the LICS Test-of-Time Award 2023 for the article Intruder Deductions, Constraint Solving and Insecurity Decision in Presence of Exclusive Or (ArXiv preprint) co-authored with Vitaly Shmatikov (SRI International). The award was shared with the related paper An NP Decision Procedure for Protocol Insecurity with XOR by Yannick Chevalier, Ralf Küsters, Michaël Rusinowitch, and Mathieu Turuani.

Cryptographic protocols rely on cryptographic primitives to achieve goals such as data privacy and data authenticity in the presence of an attacker. Their use in important applications such as communications over the Internet or credit card payments calls for the automated verification of their security. These two papers made important progress on algorithmic aspects of protocol verification with additional operators, including XOR which is widely used in real-life applications.

Specifically, these papers establish the decidability of insecurity of cryptographic protocols with XOR and other equational theories. Chevalier et al. prove membership in NP when restricted to XOR, while Comon and Shmatikov prove decidability in a broader setting. In addition to definitively settling the complexity question for these cases, the lasting value of this line of work is demonstrated by mature verification tools such as ProVerif, Tamarin, Maude-NPA, and CPSA.— Jury Laudation

Read more...