VERSE
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. We welcome candidates who will commit six months or longer to focused research on-site.

Research Themes

Our current investigations follow the themes outlined below.

For more details on our research, check out our blog posts, projects, and recent papers.

Theme 1: Certified Program Synthesis

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 Coq proof assistant and program synthesis that resulted in a series of tools that produce correct-by construction implementations for complex tasks in mainstream languages.

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

Theme 2: Trustworthy Distributed Systems

Given the importance of distributed systems and their complexity, it is vital in industry to have a rigorous verification methodology for establishing its correctness properties, ensuring that, once a distributed system is up and running, it will never go wrong and will eventually complete its goals. 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 lightweight verification of distributed systems, such as greybox fuzzing.

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

People

Faculty

Ilya Sergey
Ilya Sergey

Graduate Students

Vladimir Gladstein
Vladimir Gladstein
Kiran Gopinathan
Kiran Gopinathan
Yunjeong Lee
Yunjeong Lee
George Pîrlea
George Pîrlea
Ziyi Yang
Ziyi Yang
Qiyuan Zhao
Qiyuan Zhao

Undergraduate Researchers

Theodore Leebrant
Theodore Leebrant
Nay Chi Wint Naing
Nay Chi Wint Naing
Phong Le
Phong Le

Collaborators

Andreea Costea
Andreea Costea
Matthew Flatt
Matthew Flatt
Yuxi Ling
Yuxi Ling

News

Recent

Aug 28

Congratulations to Mayank Keoliya on awarded the 2023 NUS Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Prize!

Aug 24

Congratulations to Kiran Gopinathan on receiving a Dean's Research Excellence Award!

Aug 23

The paper on implementing Extract Method refactoring for Rust will appear at OOPSLA'23.

Aug 11

The paper on fuzzing distributed systems will appear at CCS'23.

Jun 01

The implementation of RusSOL has won a PLDI'23 Distinguished Artifact Award (single award given out of 67 submitted artifacts).

Projects

Sisyphus
Mostly automated proof repair for verified OCaml functions
RusSOL
Synthesis of Rust programs from types and lightweight specifications
SuSLik
Synthesis of heap-manipulating programs from specifications in Separation Logic
Scilla
A functional language for safe smart contracts
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

Greybox Fuzzing of Distributed Systems
Ruijie Meng, George Pîrlea, Abhik Roychoudhury and Ilya Sergey

30th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2023). Copenhagen, Denmark, December 2023.

Adventure of a Lifetime: Extract Method Refactoring for Rust
Sewen Thy, Andreea Costea, Kiran Gopinathan and Ilya Sergey

38th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA 2023). Lisbon, Portugal, October 2023.

Mostly Automated Proof Repair for Verified Libraries
Kiran Gopinathan, Mayank Keoliya and Ilya Sergey

2023 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2023). Orlando, FL, USA, June 2023. ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award

Leveraging Rust Types for Program Synthesis
Jonas Fiala, Shachar Itzhaky, Peter Müller, Nadia Polikarpova and Ilya Sergey

2023 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2023). Orlando, FL, USA, June 2023. Distinguished Artifact Award

Borrowing without Sorrowing: Implementing Extract Method Refactoring for Rust
Sewen Thy

Capstone Thesis. Yale-NUS College, 2023. Recipient of the Outstanding Yale-NUS Capstone Prize for 2023.

Formally Verifying Accountable Byzantine Consensus
Karolina Grzeszkiewicz

Capstone Thesis. Yale-NUS College, 2023.

Concurrent Structures and Effect Handlers: A Batch Made in Heaven
Koon Wen Lee

Capstone Thesis. Yale-NUS College, 2023.

HIPPODROME: Data Race Repair using Static Analysis Summaries
Andreea Costea, Abhishek Tiwari, Sigmund Chianasta, Kishore R, Abhik Roychoudhury and Ilya Sergey

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. 2023.

Random Testing of a Higher-Order Blockchain Language (Experience Report)
Tram Hoang, Anton Trunov, Leonidas Lampropoulos and Ilya Sergey

27th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2022). Ljubljana, Slovenia, September 2022.

From C towards Idiomatic & Safer Rust through Constraints-Guided Refactoring
Bryan Tan Yao Hong

MComp Thesis. NUS School of Computing, 2022.

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