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
Phone: +49 (89) 2180-9376
E-Mail: firstname.lastname@lmu.de
Chat: Zulip (LMU/IFI internal)

GPG-Key

Please send me encrypted mails!
My GPG key: 0x43E74A64
Fingerprint: 2936 1F81 7F7E 77FC 114F E87D 864B 9E41 43E7 4A64

Consider using the keyserver at https://keys.openpgp.org/.

Personal

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

Interests: formal methods for software engineering, software testing, interactive and automated proofs, hybrid systems falsification.

This Page

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

Recent

[04/2021] Paper accepted: Gidon Ernst, Johannes Blau and Toby Murray: Deductive Verification via the Debug Adapter Protocol, To be presented at F-IDE. Draft.
[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. Open Access.
[12/2020] Results for SV-COMP: My tool Korn did well in four categories, notably ReachSafety-Recursive!
[12/2020] Results for Test-Comp are available! See Legion (with D. Liu and others) and CMA-ES Fuzz (with H. Kim).
[09/2020] Talk at the CPAchecker workshow 2020 on Loop Invariants and Summaries. Slides, Draft, Project.
[09/2020] Publication: Dongge Liu, Gidon Ernst, Toby Murray, Ben Rubinstein: Legion: Best-First Concolic Testing. ASE 2020, Preprint. See also the competition on software testing.
[09/2020] Publication: Proceedings of the ARCH workshop 2020, including the report of the falsification competition.
[07/2020] Publication: Proceedings of the VerifyThis long-term challenge, including a testing approach (with Lukas Rieger), and an approach to verifying the information flow (with Toby Murray).

Lehrveranstaltungen (siehe auch)

Sommersemester 2021 (Vorlesungszeitraum: 12.4.-16.7.)

Methods in in Software Engineering (Ernst, in English, Master level)
Master Seminar "Software Quality Assurance", (Ernst, Kanav, in English)
Supervision: remotely, presentations: video recordings, final written report
Bachelorseminar "Softwarequalität", (Mitarbeiter des SoSy-Labs)
Die Besprechungen finden online statt, Präsentation (als Videoaufzeichnung), schriftliche Ausarbeitung

Wintersemester 2020/21 (Vorlesungszeitraum: 2.11.-12.2.)

Einführung in die Informatik: Programmierung und Softwareentwicklung für Nebenfach (Ernst, Wendler, 3+1+2)
Vorlesung: via Aufzeichnung/Folien, Übung: teilweise in Präsenz geplant.
Formale Spezifikation und Verifikation (Ernst, Holzner, 3+2)
Vorlesung: via Aufzeichnung/Folien, Übung: teilweise in Präsenz geplant.
Masterseminar "Software Quality Assurance" (Ernst, Kanav, in English, 2)
Supervision: remotely, presentations: online live or as video recordings

Thesis Mentoring (see also)

Currently assigned topics

Frontends for a deductive verifier (Python)

Simplification and solving strategies for SMT

Development of an interactive theorem prover for untyped logic

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 (Boogie)

Guided fuzz testing with stochastic optimization

Interactive verification debugging

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

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 2020 (postponed to 2021), ARCH 2020, ARCH 2019, VerifyThis 2018
PC: HSCC 2021, VSTTE 2020, SAC 2020, 4PAD 2019, SAC 2019, 4PAD 2018
PC (artifact evaluation): HSCC 2020, SAS 2018