Prof. Dr. Gidon Ernst, LMU Munich

Prof. Dr. Gidon Ernst

Junior Professor, Software Verification

Software and Computational Systems Lab
Department of Computer Science
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich)
Oettingenstraße 67
80538 Munich (Germany)

Office: Room F 007, Oettingenstr. 67
Office hours: By appointment, via https://meet.lrz.de/gidon
E-Mail: firstname.lastname@lmu.de
Chat: Zulip (LMU/IFI internal)

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Personal

CV, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, DBLP, ORCID, GitHub, Twitter

formal methods for software engineering
software testing
interactive and automated proofs
hybrid systems falsification

This Page

Recent, Teaching, Thesis Mentoring, Research, Software, Service

Recent

[04/2022] Preprint: Gidon Ernst, Alexander Knapp, Toby Murray: A Hoare Logic with Regular Behavioral Specifications, arXiv
[01/2022] Presentation of Loop Verification with Invariants and Contracts at VMCAI 2022, Technical Report, Slides, Video
[12/2021] Paper Accepted: Dongge Liu, Van-Thuan Pham, Gidon Ernst, Toby Murray, Benjamin Rubinstein: State Selection Algorithms and Their Impact on The Performance of Stateful Network Protocol Fuzzing, SANER 2022.
[12/2021] Publication of the report from the falsification category category of ARCH-COMP 2021. DOI: Paper, Data; GitLab.
[12/2021] Results for Test-Comp: This year we participated with a new implementation of Legion called Legion/SymCC. It is based on the SymCC backend and shows competitive results in many categories, despite being an early prototype.
[12/2021] Results for SV-COMP: My tool Korn did well in some categories, notably ReachSafety-Recursive!
[10/2021] Paper Accepted: Gidon Ernst: Loop Verification with Invariants and Contracts, VMCAI 2022, Technical Report
[08/2021] Publication: Gidon Ernst, Johannes Blau and Toby Murray: Deductive Verification via the Debug Adapter Protocol, F-IDE 2021, DOI.
[07/2021] Publication: Gidon Ernst, Sean Sedwards, Zhenya Zhang, and Ichiro Hasuo: Falsification of Hybrid Systems Using Adaptive Probabilistic Search, ACM TOMACS. DOI.
[07/2021] Presentation of the results from the falsification category category of ARCH-COMP 2021.
[04/2021] VerifyThis 2021 solution to challenge 2 in SecC: Linked List to Binary Tree
[12/2020] Publication: Grigory Fedyukovich, Gidon Ernst: Bridging Arrays and ADTs in Recursive Proofs, TACAS 2021, DOI.

Lehrveranstaltungen (siehe auch)

Sommersemester 2022 (Vorlesungszeitraum: 25.4.-29.7.)

Lecture: Methods in Software Engineering (in English, Master-level, but open for Bachelor)
Bachelor-Seminar: Programmsynthese (via Zentralanmeldung)

Wintersemester 2021/22 (Vorlesungszeitraum: 18.10.-11.2.)

Mentoring, Bachelor-/Master Theses (see also)

Currently assigned topics

Inference of Invariants over Algebraic Data Types

Test-case generation for protocol implementations via fuzzing

Concolic Testing for Liskov's substitution principle (working title)

Studie: PBT Driven Design am Beispiel eines Embedded Software Projekts

Finished topics

Specifying Loops with Contracts. [1]

Information flow testing for PGP keyservers

Implement Fuzzing in CPAchecker

SMT-based checking and synthesis of formal refinements

Rely/Guarantee Reasoning for Separation Logic in SecC

Loop Contracts for Boogie and Dafny

Frontends for a deductive verifier (Python)

Frontends for a deductive verifier (Boogie)

Guided fuzz testing with stochastic optimization

Interactive verification debugging [1]

Simplification and solving strategies for SMT

Development of an interactive theorem prover for untyped logic

Further topics can be discussed on request.

Before contacting me with your own topic proposal, please think about this first: What would be the scientific question leading your project? Does the topic fit well with the research and teaching area of Prof. Ernst?

See also: Merkblatt für externe Arbeiten des Prüfungsamtes.

Research

Relational Proofs

The goal is to infer simulation relations and invariants to prove that two implementations of the same interface exhibit the same external behavior (i.e., Liskov and Wing’s substitution principle).

Notably, we focus on complex data types such as Arrays and Lists in combination where simulation relations often need to be defined by recursion with the help of quantifiers.

Joint work with Grigory Fedyukovich.

Softare Testing

Legion is a software tester based on a tight integration of concolic execution and fuzzing, mediated by Monte-Carlo tree search. Input values to target a specific part of the program are generated by approximate path-preserving fuzzing, a variant of constrained random sampling, using an adaption of the Quicksampler algorithm.

Joint work with Dongge Liu, Ben Rubinstein, Toby Murray.

See also the competition on software testing.

Concurrent Information Flow

Security Concurrent Separation Logic (SecCSL) combines reasoning about expressive, value-dependent security classifications with concurrency and low-level code.
The approach is implemented in the tool SecC (code on bitbucket).

Joint work with Toby Murray (University of Melbourne).

Falsification

Falsification of temporal logic requirements for hybrid systems. See FalStar and the ARCH competition on falsification.

Joint work with Ichiro Hasuo, Sean Sedwards, Zhenya Zhang (NII Tokyo, University of Waterloo).

Previous Projects

KIV: interactive theorem prover and software verification platform (see also VerifyThis)
Flashix: verified file system for flash memory (github)
With Wolfgang Reif, Gerhard Schellhorn, Jörg Pfähler, Stefan Bodenmüller (Augsburg University).
IMP3: integration of shape analysis and theorem proving
Takatuka: Java Virtual Machine for sensor networks

PhD Students

Dongge Liu: Software fuzzing with machine learning (2018–).
Co-supervised with Ben Rubinstein, Toby Murray (University of Melbourne).

Software

Korn: Horn-clause based verifier for C, draft.
Legion: tight integration of concolic execution and fuzzing.
Cuvée: SMT-LIB with programs and weakest preconditions, draft.
Arse: LL parsing for Scala case classes made simple.
SecC: verified information flow for C.
FalStar: hybrid systems falsification.

Service

PC co-chair: FTfJP 2019 at ECOOP 2019
Co-organizer: AVM 2022, Mentoring Workshop @ ETAPS 2022, ARCH 2019–2021, VerifyThis 2018
PC: HSCC 2021, VSTTE 2020, SAC 2020, 4PAD 2019, SAC 2019, 4PAD 2018
PC (artifact evaluation): HSCC 2020, SAS 2018