Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Thu, 30/03/2023 - 11:10
Congratulations to Professor Peter Sewell who was today awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for his project 'SAFER' – 'Secure Foundations: Verified Systems Software Above Full-Scale Integrated Semantics'.
This is one of 218 Advanced Grants the European Research Council has awarded today (30 March) to outstanding research leaders across Europe.
The grants – totalling €544 million – support cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields from medicine and physics to social sciences and humanities.
The ERC Advanced Grant funding is amongst the most prestigious and competitive EU funding schemes, providing researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. Nearly 1650 proposals were submitted to the call and just 218 were awarded, a success rate of 13.2%.
This offers a path towards a substantially more robust and secure computing infrastructure, to truly make us safer from malicious attack on our data and systems.
Professor Peter Sewell
The Advanced Grants are awarded to established, leading researchers with a proven track-record of significant research achievements over the past decade. The funding will enable these researchers to explore their most innovative and ambitious ideas.
The 'SAFER' project will involve several researchers here plus Professor Ian Stark at the University of Edinburgh. It will look for new ways to make us safer from malicious attack on our data and systems.
"Conventional industrial software development relies on testing, but testing can only ever check a few execution paths," explains Peter Sewell, Professor of Computer Science here, "and that leaves our computing infrastructure fundamentally flawed, with exploitable errors that expose all of us to continual risks of malicious attack.
"This is especially important for systems software – the operating systems and hypervisors that use the underlying hardware-architecture mechanisms to protect running programs from each other – as flaws in these let attacks spread."
This long-standing problem has prompted much research in mathematical approaches to software development, as machine-checked proof can provide high assurance – but research has lagged behind mainstream engineering, unable to handle the subtleties and scale of real architectures and systems code.
Peter says: "SAFER will build on and extend recent advances to produce usable full-scale mathematical models of real-world architectures, covering systems features including virtual memory, and to develop mathematically-grounded, rigorous engineering techniques above them, complementing existing practice with mathematical specifications, methods, and assurance, in ways that can be adopted in practice.
"This offers a path towards a substantially more robust and secure computing infrastructure, to truly make us safer from malicious attack on our data and systems."
