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Verified Systems Engineering @ NUS
Building trustworthy safety-critical systems and advancing the state of the art in formal verification

About Us

Group photo

We do research in the design and implementation of programming languages, program synthesis, and computer-assisted formal reasoning about complex systems, at the School of Computing of National University of Singapore, as a part of PLSE@NUS lab.

Announcements

Postdoc positions are available in a project on automated program repair via static analysis and verification. Check out the project page for the details and get in touch!

We are actively looking for motivated PhD students! Get in touch with Ilya Sergey if you want to chat about research opportunities, and apply here.

Research internships: In case if you are interested in an internship with us, please get in touch with your CV and a paragraph of text describing your specific interests in the research themes we pursue at the moment. Strong background in PL/logic/verification or systems-building is a must. Prospective internship candidates will have to complete a test verification task.

News

Apr 14

We are excited to release Veil, a new framework for verifying distributed protocols both automatically and interactively, in Lean! The accompanying paper will appear at the CAV’25.

Feb 21
Jan 25

A paper on programming language synthesis for automated exploit generation is accepted at USENIX Security’25.

Jan 09

Congratulations to Yunjeong Lee and Ziyi Yang on receiving Research Achievement Awards!

Sep 01

Research Themes

Most of research done in the lab for now is powered by Lean proof assistant.

Our current investigations follow the themes outlined below. For more details on our research, check out our projects, and recent papers.

Theme 1: Verified Software Systems

Given the importance of modern software systems (e.g., distributed systems, concurrency and high-performance computing libraries, etc) and their complexity, it is vital in industry to have a rigorous verification methodology for establishing their correctness properties as well as for making sure that the once completed proofs don’t go “bit rot”. In this line of work, our recent work has introduced logical foundations for compositional verification of complex distributed protocols using a proof assistant. We have also produced the first mechanically verified proof of safety of Nakamoto consensus, its probabilistic properties and verified libraries of relevant probabilistic data structures. We also explored techniques for both foundational and lightweight verification of distributed systems. Finally, we have developed the first approach for (mostly) automated evolution of proofs for verified libraries.

Our long-term goal is to build verification tools that bridge the gap between the systems implementations and their abstract models that can be verified in an interactive or automated fashion, producing robust and easy-to-maintain proofs.

Theme 2: Program Synthesis with Correctness Guarantees

Program synthesis is an emerging research and technology paradigm for automatically deriving programs from user-provided declarative specifications, thereby significantly reducing the implementation effort required for producing correct-by-construction and efficient code. Our recent work explored the marriage of state-of-the-art techniques for deductive proofs in a proof assistants (e.g., Coq and Lean) and program synthesis that resulted in a series of tools that produce correct-by construction implementations for complex tasks in mainstream languages, as well as approaches for automatically synthesisng data structure specifications.

Our long-term agenda targets synthesis of provably correct high-performance, safety-critical programs with the focus on low-effort proof automation and evolution.

Theme 3: Foundations of Verified Program Generation

Often, it is not easy capture an intent of a program synthesis task with a specification that can be also used to formally verify that the synthesised program is indeed correct. In our recent work we started to approach instances of program synthesis with such “intuitive but tricky to make formal” specifications, including generation of sparse data manipulations and automated exploit discovery, from the perspective of program logics.

Our vision in this line of work is to push the state of the art in what can be specified and synthesised, by developing expressive formalisms that capture the program synthesis intent and allow one to mechanically verify its result, interactively or automatically.

People

Faculty

Ilya Sergey
Ilya Sergey

Graduate Students

Vladimir Gladshtein
Vladimir Gladshtein
Yunjeong Lee
Yunjeong Lee
Yuxi Ling
Yuxi Ling
George Pîrlea
George Pîrlea
Ziyi Yang
Ziyi Yang
Qiyuan Zhao
Qiyuan Zhao

Undergraduate Researchers

Vikram Goyal
Vikram Goyal
Gokul Rajiv
Gokul Rajiv

Recent Collaborators

Elad Kinsbruner
Elad Kinsbruner
Willow Ahrens
Willow Ahrens
Saman Amarasinghe
Saman Amarasinghe
Zhendong Ang
Zhendong Ang
Andreea Costea
Andreea Costea
Jonáš Fiala
Jonáš Fiala
Matthew Flatt
Matthew Flatt
Seth Gilbert
Seth Gilbert
Umang Mathur
Umang Mathur
Peter Müller
Peter Müller
Nadia Polikarpova
Nadia Polikarpova
Alex Potanin
Alex Potanin

Projects

Veil

A framework for verifying distributed systems automatically and interactive in Lean

Splean

A simple Separation Logic in Lean

LeanSSR

An SSReflect-Like Tactic Language for Lean

OBatcher

A Multicore OCaml library for batch-parallel data structures

Bythos

A Coq framework for verifying Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols

LGTM

A hyperlogic for verifying sparse tensor manipulations

Sisyphus

Mostly automated proof repair for verified OCaml functions

SuSLik

Synthesis of heap-manipulating programs from specifications in Separation Logic

ego

An OCaml library that provides generic equality saturation using EGraphs

Ceramist

Verified hash-based approximate membership structures.

Toychain

A Coq implementation of a minimalistic blockchain-based consensus protocol

DiSeL

Mechanised Separation Logic for Compositional Verification of Distributed Protocols

Publications

Recent

Veil: A Framework for Automated and Interactive Verification of Transition Systems

George Pîrlea and Vladimir Gladshtein and and Elad Kinsbruner and and Qiyuan Zhao and and Ilya Sergey

37th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2025). Zagreb, Croatia, July 2025.

PDF Code Artefact

Inductive Synthesis of Inductive Heap Predicates

Ziyi Yang and Ilya Sergey

40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA 2025). Singapore, October 2024.

Sound and Efficient Generation of Data-Oriented Exploits via Programming Language Synthesis

Yuxi Ling and Gokul Rajiv and Kiran Gopinathan and Ilya Sergey

34th USENIX Security Symposium. Seattle, WA, USA, August 2025.

Concurrent Data Structures Made Easy

Callista Le and Kiran Gopinathan and Koon Wen Lee and Seth Gilbert and Ilya Sergey

39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA 2024). Pasadena, CA, USA, October 2024.

DSLs in Racket: You Want It How, Now?

Yunjeong Lee and Kiran Gopinathan and Ziyi Yang and Matthew Flatt and Ilya Sergey

17th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE ’24). Pasadena, CA, USA, October 2024.

Compositional Verification of Composite Byzantine Protocols

Qiyuan Zhao and George Pîrlea and Karolina Grzeszkiewicz and Seth Gilbert and Ilya Sergey

31st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2024). Salt Lake City, UT, USA, October 2024.

PDF Code Artefact

Higher-Order Specifications for Deductive Synthesis of Programs with Pointers

David Young and Ziyi Yang and Ilya Sergey and Alex Potanin

38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024). Vienna, Austria, September 2024.

Scaling the Evolution of Verified Software

Kiran Gopinathan

PhD Thesis. NUS School of Computing, August 2024.

Mechanised Hypersafety Proofs about Structured Data

Vladimir Gladshtein and Qiyuan Zhao and Willow Ahrens and Saman Amarasinghe and Ilya Sergey

2024 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2024). Copenhagen, Denmark, June 2024.

Simple and Efficient Concurrent Data Structures via Batch Parallelism

Callista Le

Capstone Thesis. Yale-NUS College, 2024.

VERSE
Verified Systems Engineering
Yale-NUS College
NUS School of Computing