Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF), and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) have coauthored 20 papers at the LICS 2026 and ICALP 2026 conferences, two of the top conferences in theoretical computer science. LICS is the premier conference on logic in computer science and ICALP is the flagship conference of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

MPI-SWS papers:

1. Automata on S-adic Words. Valérie Berthé, *Toghrul Karimov*, and *Mihir Vahanwala* (ICALP, Track B)
2. Hypersequent calculi have Ackermannian upper bounds. *A. R. Balasubramanian*, Vitor Greati and Revantha Ramanayake (LICS)
3. Infinite-state games with energy objectives beyond counters. *Irmak Saglam* and *Georg Zetzsche* (ICALP, Track B)
4. On the Subspace Orbit Problem and the Simultaneous Skolem Problem. *Piotr Bacik* and Anton Varonka (LICS)
5. On Variable-Bounded Non-Linear Expansions of Presburger Arithmetic. *Piotr Bacik*, *Joris Nieuwveld*, *Joël Ouaknine*, *Mihir Vahanwala*, *Madhavan Venkatesh* and *Emil Rugaard Wieser* (LICS)
6. Optimally Controlling a Random Population. Hugo Gimbert, *Corto Mascle*, Patrick Totzke (ICALP, Track B)
7. Optimal Sequential Flows. Hugo Gimbert, *Corto Mascle*, Patrick Totzke (ICALP, Track A)
8. Population Protocols over Ordered Agents. Michael Blondin, Michaël Cadilhac, Benjamin Courchesne, *Lucie Guillou*, *Corto Mascle*, and *Isa Vialard* (ICALP, Track B)
9. The Complexity of Nested Reset Counter Systems. *A. R. Balasubramanian* and Franzisco Schmidt (LICS)
10. The complexity of downward closures of indexed languages. *Richard Mandel*, *Corto Mascle* and *Georg Zetzsche* (LICS)

MPI-SP papers:

1. Complete Relational Logic for Infinite-Dimensional Quantum Programs with Unbounded Assertions. *Gilles Barthe*, Minbo Gao, *Jam Kabeer Ali Khan*, *Matthijs Muis*, *Ivan Renison*, Keiya Sakabe, Michael Walter, *Yingte Xu*, Tianshi Yu and Li Zhou (LICS)

MPI-INF papers:

1. A Faster Directed Single-Source Shortest Path Algorithm. Ran Duan, Xiao Mao, *Xinkai Shu*, Longhui Yin (ICALP, Track A)
2. Computing the (k+2)-Edge-Connected Components in k-Edge-Connected Digraphs in Subquadratic Time. Loukas Georgiadis, *Evangelos Kipouridis*, Evangelos Kosinas, Charis Papadopoulos, Nikos Parotsidis (ICALP, Track A)
3. Faster algorithms for k-Orthogonal Vectors in low dimension. *Anita Dürr*, *Evangelos Kipouridis*, Michael Lampis, *Karol Wegrzycki* (ICALP, Track A)
4. Fast decremental tree sums in forests. *Benjamin Aram Berendsohn*, *Marek Sokołowski* (ICALP, Track A)
5. Improved Tree Sparsifiers in Near-Linear Time. Daniel Agassy, *Dani Dorfman*, Haim Kaplan (ICALP, Track A)
6. Low Rank MSO. Mikołaj Bojańczyk, Michał Pilipczuk, Wojciech Przybyszewski, *Marek Sokołowski* and Giannos Stamoulis (LICS)
7. Node-Weighted Triangles: Faster and Simpler. *Shyan Akmal*, *Nick Fischer* (ICALP, Track A)
8. Permutation Patterns in Streams. *Benjamin Aram Berendsohn* (ICALP, Track A)
9. Random Access in Grammar-Compressed Strings: Optimal Trade-Offs in Almost All Parameter Regimes. *Anouk Duyster*, *Tomasz Kociumaka* (ICALP, Track A)

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) have authored a total of 5 papers accepted to POPL 2026.  This is the ninth year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5+ papers in POPL.

Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

• A Verified High-Performance Composable Object Library for Remote Direct Memory Access Guillaume Ambal, George Hodgkins, Mark Madler, Gregory Chockler, Brijesh Dongol, Joe Izraelevitz, Azalea Raad, Viktor Vafeiadis
• Bounded Treewidth, Multiple Context-Free Grammars, and Downward ClosuresRemote C. Aiswarya, Pascal Baumann, Prakash Saivasan, Lia Schütze, Georg Zetzsche
• Endangered by the Language But Saved by the Compiler: Robust Safety via Semantic Back-Translation Niklas Mück, Aina Linn Georges, Derek Dreyer, Deepak Garg, Michael Sammler
• General Decidability Results for Systems with Continuous Counters A. R. Balasubramanian, Matthew Hague, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, Georg Zetzsche
• Verifying Almost-Sure Termination for Randomized Distributed Algorithms Constantin Enea, Rupak Majumdar, Harshit Jitendra Motwani, V.R. Sathiyanarayana 

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) have authored a total of 9 papers accepted to POPL 2025.  This is the eighth year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5+ papers in POPL. Furthermore, as of this year, MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer has published 25 papers at POPL----a new record!

Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

• Data Race Freedom à la Mode by Aina Linn Georges, Benjamin Peters, Laila Elbeheiry, Leo White, Stephen Dolan, Richard A. Eisenberg, Chris Casinghino, François Pottier, Derek Dreyer   ***Recipient of a distinguished paper award.
• A quantitative probabilistic relational Hoare logic by Martin Avanzini, Gilles Barthe, Benjamin Gregoire, Davide Davoli
• Automating equational proofs in Dirac notation by Yingte Xu, Gilles Barthe, Li Zhou
• Preservation of speculative constant-time by compilation by Santiago Arranz Olmos, Gilles Barthe, Lionel Blatter, Benjamin Gregoire, Vincent Laporte
• Sound and Complete Proof Rules for Probabilistic Termination by Rupak Majumdar, V.R. Sathiyanarayana
• RELINCHE: Automatically Checking Linearizability under Relaxed Memory Consistency by Pavel Golovin, Michalis Kokologiannakis, Viktor Vafeiadis
• Model Checking C/C++ with Mixed-Size Accesses by Iason Marmanis, Michalis Kokologiannakis, Viktor Vafeiadis
• Bluebell: An Alliance of Relational Lifting and Independence For Probabilistic Reasoning by Jialu Bao, Emanuele D'Osualdo, Azadeh Farzan
• Archmage and CompCertCast: End-to-End Verification Supporting Integer-Pointer Casting Yonghyun Kim, Minki Cho, Jaehyung Lee, Jinwoo Kim, Taeyoung Yoon, Youngju Song, Chung-Kil Hur

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) have authored a total of 7 papers accepted to POPL 2024.  This is the seventh year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5+ papers in POPL.  Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

• Decision and Complexity of Dolev-Yao Hyperproperties by Itsaka Rakotonirina, Gilles Barthe, Clara Schneidewind
• Parikh's Theorem Made Symbolic by Matthew Hague, Artur Jez, Anthony Widjaja Lin
• Positive Almost-Sure Termination – Complexity and Proof Rules by Rupak Majumdar and V.R. Sathiyanarayana.
• Ramsey Quantifiers in Linear Arithmetics by Pascal Bergsträßer, Moses Ganardi, Anthony Widjaja Lin, Georg Zetzsche
• Reachability in Continuous Pushdown VASS by A. R. Balasubramanian, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, Georg Zetzsche
• Regular Abstractions for Array Systems by Chih-Duo Hong and Anthony Widjaja Lin
• Securing Verified IO Programs Against Unverified Code in F* by Cezar-Constantin Andrici, Stefan Ciobaca, Cătălin Hriţcu, Guido Martínez, Exequiel Rivas, Éric Tanter, Théo Winterhalter

At ICALP 2023 and LICS 2023, two of the top conferences in logic and automata, there will be 6 papers by SWS researchers.

LICS 2023 (accepted papers: https://lics.siglog.org/lics23/accepted.php )

• Pascal Bergsträßer and Moses Ganardi. Revisiting Membership Problems in Subclasses of Rational Relations
• Faraz Ghahremani, Edon Kelmendi and Joël Ouaknine. Reachability in Injective Piecewise Affine Maps
• Toghrul Karimov, Edon Kelmendi, Joris Nieuwveld, Joël Ouaknine and James Worrell. The Power of Positivity

ICALP 2023 (accepted papers: https://icalp2023.cs.upb.de/accepted-papers/ )

• Marvin Künnemann, Filip Mazowiecki, Lia Schütze, Henry Sinclair-Banks and Karol Węgrzycki. Coverability in VASS Revisited: Improving Rackoff’s Bound to Obtain Conditional Optimality
• Pascal Baumann, Moses Ganardi, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan Thinniyam Srinivasan and Georg Zetzsche. Checking Refinement of Asynchronous Programs against Context-Free Specifications
• George Kenison, Joris Nieuwveld, Joël Ouaknine and James Worrell. Positivity Problems for Reversible Linear Recurrence Sequences

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) have authored a total of 6 papers accepted to POPL 2023.  This is the sixth year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5+ papers in POPL.  Furthermore, one Max Planck paper was awarded a 2023 POPL Distinguished Paper Award. Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

• Conditional Contextual Refinement by Youngju Song, Minki Cho, Dongjae Lee, Chung-Kil Hur, Michael Sammler, Derek Dreyer
• Context-Bounded Verification of Context-Free Specifications by Pascal Baumann, Moses Ganardi, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, Georg Zetzsche
• DimSum: A Decentralized Approach to Multi-language Semantics and Verification by Michael Sammler, Simon Spies, Youngju Song, Emanuele D’Osualdo, Robbert Krebbers, Deepak Garg, Derek Dreyer.  DISTINGUISHED PAPER
• Kater: Automating Weak Memory Model Metatheory and Consistency Checking by Michalis Kokologiannakis, Ori Lahav, Viktor Vafeiadis
• The Path to Durable Linearizability by Emanuele D’Osualdo, Azalea Raad, Viktor Vafeiadis
• CoqQ: Foundational Verification of Quantum Programs by Li Zhou, Gilles Barthe, Pierre-Yves Strub, Junyi Liu, Mingsheng Ying

Researchers from MPI-SWS have authored a total of 11 papers accepted to POPL 2022 (just under 17% of all accepted papers).  This is the fifth year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5+ papers in POPL.  Furthermore, two Max Planck papers were awarded a 2022 POPL Distinguished Paper Award. Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

• Concurrent Incorrectness Separation Logic Azalea Raad, Josh Berdine, Derek Dreyer, Peter W. O'Hearn
• Context-Bounded Verification of Thread Pools  Pascal Baumann, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, Georg Zetzsche
• Extending Intel-x86 Consistency and Persistency: Formalising the Semantics of Intel-x86 Memory Types and Non-Temporal Stores Azalea Raad, Luc Maranget, Viktor Vafeiadis
• Isolation Without Taxation: Near Zero Cost Transitions for WebAssembly and SFI Matthew Kolosick, Shravan Ravi Narayan, Evan Johnson, Conrad Watt, Michael LeMay, Deepak Garg, Ranjit Jhala, Deian Stefan
• Pirouette: Higher-Order Typed Functional Choreographies Andrew K. Hirsch, Deepak Garg. DISTINGUISHED PAPER
• Simuliris: A Separation Logic Framework for Verifying Concurrent Program Optimizations  Lennard Gäher, Michael Sammler, Simon Spies, Ralf Jung, Hoang-Hai Dang, Robbert Krebbers, Jeehoon Kang, Derek Dreyer.  DISTINGUISHED PAPER
• Solving String Constraints with Regex-Dependent Functions through Transducers with Priorities and Variables Taolue Chen, Alejandro Flores Lamas, Matthew Hague, Zhilei Han, Denghang Hu, Shuanglong Kan, Anthony Widjaja Lin, Philipp Ruemmer, Zhilin Wu
• Subcubic Certificates for CFL Reachability Dmitry Chistikov, Rupak Majumdar, Philipp Schepper
• Truly Stateless, Optimal Dynamic Partial Order Reduction Michalis Kokologiannakis, Iason Marmanis, Vladimir Gladstein, Viktor Vafeiadis
• VIP: Verifying Real-World C Idioms with Integer-Pointer Casts Rodolphe Lepigre, Michael Sammler, Kayvan Memarian, Robbert Krebbers, Derek Dreyer, Peter Sewell
• What's Decidable about Linear Loops? Toghrul Karimov, Engel Lefaucheux, Joël Ouaknine, David Purser, Anton Varonka, Markus A. Whiteland, James Worrell

Ralf Jung's doctoral dissertation on "Understanding and Evolving the Rust Programming Language" has received the ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award for 2021. The award is given to the PhD student who has made the most original and influential contribution to the research areas in the scope of the ETAPS conferences, and has graduated in 2021 at a European academic institution. Ralf was advised by MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer.

A committee of international experts evaluated candidate dissertations with respect to originality, relevance, and impact to the field, as well as the quality of writing. The committee found that Dr. Ralf Jung's dissertation is very well-written and makes several highly original contributions in the area of programming language semantics and verification. The committee was also particularly impressed by the dissertation for its technical depth, the quality and quantity of the associated published work, as well as its relevance and impact both in academia and industry.

Ralf's work on Rust was also featured in a recent Communications of the ACM article: Safe Systems Programming in Rust by Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Robbert Krebbers, and Derek Dreyer. The article appeared in the April 2021 issue of CACM, together with a short video about this work produced by ACM.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and the new Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) have authored a total of 8 papers accepted to POPL 2021 (over 10% of all accepted papers).  This is the fourth year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5+ papers in POPL.  Furthermore, two Max Planck papers were awarded a Distinguished Paper Award. Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

MPI-SWS papers:

• A Unifying Type-Theory for Higher-Order (Amortized) Cost Analysis Vineet Rajani, Marco Gaboardi, Deepak Garg, Jan Hoffmann
• Context-Bounded Verification of Liveness Properties for Multithreaded Shared-Memory Programs Pascal Baumann, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan S. Thinniyam, Georg Zetzsche DISTINGUISHED PAPER
• Deciding ω-Regular Properties on Linear Recurrence Sequences Shaull Almagor, Toghrul Karimov, Edon Kelmendi, Joël Ouaknine, James Worrell
• Giving Semantics to Program-Counter Labels via Secure Effects Andrew Hirsch, Ethan Cecchetti
• PerSeVerE: Persistency Semantics for Verification under Ext4 Michalis Kokologiannakis, Ilya Kaysin, Azalea Raad, Viktor Vafeiadis
• Transfinite Step-Indexing for Termination Simon Spies, Neel Krishnaswami, Derek Dreyer

MPI-SP papers:

• A Pre-Expectation Calculus for Probabilistic Sensitivity Alejandro Aguirre, Gilles Barthe, Justin Hsu, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja DISTINGUISHED PAPER
• Deciding Accuracy of Differential Privacy Schemes Gilles Barthe, Rohit Chadha, Paul Krogmeier, A. Prasad Sistla, Mahesh Viswanathan

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF), and the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) have coauthored 17 papers at the colocated LICS 2020 and ICALP 2020, two of the top conferences in theoretical computer science. LICS is the premier conference on logic in computer science and ICALP is the flagship conference of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

MPI-SWS papers:

1. Invariants for Continuous Linear Dynamical Systems. Shaull Almagor, Edon Kelmendi, Joël Ouaknine and James Worrell. ICALP 2020, Track B. [ Video | Paper]
2. The complexity of bounded context switching with dynamic thread creation. Pascal Baumann, Rupak Majumdar, Ramanathan Thinniyam Srinivasan and Georg Zetzsche. ICALP 2020, Track B. [ Video | Paper ]
3. Extensions of ω-Regular Languages. Mikołaj Bojańczyk, Edon Kelmendi, Rafał Stefański and Georg Zetzsche. LICS 2020. [ Video | Paper ]
4. Rational subsets of Baumslag-Solitar groups. Michaël Cadilhac, Dmitry Chistikov and Georg Zetzsche. ICALP 2020, Track B. [ Video | Paper ]
5. On polynomial recursive sequences. Michaël Cadilhac, Filip Mazowiecki, Charles Paperman, Michał Pilipczuk and Géraud Sénizergues. ICALP 2020, Track B. [ Video | Paper ]
6. An Approach to Regular Separability in Vector Addition Systems. Wojciech Czerwiński and Georg Zetzsche. LICS 2020. [ Video | Paper ]
7. The complexity of knapsack problems in wreath products. Michael Figelius, Moses Ganardi, Markus Lohrey and Georg Zetzsche. ICALP 2020, Track B. [ Video | Paper ]
8. The Complexity of Verifying Loop-free Programs as Differentially Private. Marco Gaboardi, Kobbi Nissim and David Purser. ICALP 2020, Track B. [ Video | Paper ]
9. On Decidability of Time-bounded Reachability in CTMDPs. Rupak Majumdar, Mahmoud Salamati and Sadegh Soudjani. ICALP 2020, Track B. [ Video | Paper ]

MPI-INF papers:

1. Scheduling Lower Bounds via AND Subset Sum. Amir Abboud, Karl Bringmann, Danny Hermelin and Dvir Shabtay. ICALP 2020, Track A.  [ Video | Paper ]
2. Faster Minimization of Tardy Processing Time on a Single Machine. Karl Bringmann, Nick Fischer, Danny Hermelin, Dvir Shabtay and Philip Wellnitz. ICALP 2020, Track A. [ Video | Paper ]
3. Hitting Long Directed Cycles is Fixed-Parameter Tractable. Alexander Göke, Dániel Marx and Matthias Mnich. ICALP 2020, Track A. [ Video | Paper ]
4. A (2 + ε)-Factor Approximation Algorithm for Split Vertex Deletion. Daniel Lokshtanov, Pranabendu Misra, Fahad Panolan, Geevarghese Philip and Saket Saurabh. ICALP 2020, Track A. [ Video | Paper ]
5. Hypergraph Isomorphism for Groups with Restricted Composition Factors. Daniel Neuen. ICALP 2020, Track A. [ Video | Paper ]
6. Deterministic Sparse Fourier Transform with an l∞ Guarante. Yi Li and Vasileios Nakos. ICALP 2020, Track A. [ Video | Paper ]

MPI-SP papers:

1. Deciding Differential Privacy for Programs with Finite Inputs and Outputs. Gilles Barthe, Rohit Chadha, Vishal Jagannath, A. Prasad Sistla and Mahesh Viswanathan. LICS 2020. [ Video | Paper ]
2. Universal equivalence and majority on probabilistic programs over finite fields. Charlie Jacomme, Steve Kremer and Gilles Barthe. LICS 2020. [ Video | Paper ]

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and the new Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP) have authored a total of 8 papers accepted to POPL 2020 (over 10% of all accepted papers).  This is the third year in a row that MPI-SWS researchers have published 5 papers in POPL.  Furthermore, MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer is the first person ever to publish 4 papers in a single POPL.  Congratulations to all our POPL authors!

MPI-SWS papers:

• The Future is Ours: Prophecy Variables in Separation Logic. Ralf Jung, Rodolphe Lepigre, Gaurav Parthasarathy, Marianna Rapoport, Amin Timany, Derek Dreyer, Bart Jacobs. [pdf]
• The High-Level Benefits of Low-Level Sandboxing. Michael Sammler, Deepak Garg, Derek Dreyer, Tadeusz Litak. [pdf]
• Persistency Semantics of the Intel-x86 Architecture. Azalea Raad, John Wickerson, Gil Neiger, Viktor Vafeiadis. [pdf]
• RustBelt Meets Relaxed Memory. Hoang-Hai Dang, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Jan-Oliver Kaiser, Derek Dreyer. [pdf]
• Stacked Borrows: An Aliasing Model for Rust. Ralf Jung, Hoang-Hai Dang, Jeehoon Kang, Derek Dreyer. [pdf]

MPI-SP papers:

• Formal Verification of a Constant-Time Preserving C Compiler. Gilles Barthe, Sandrine Blazy, Benjamin Gregoire, Rémi Hutin, Vincent Laporte, David Pichardie, Alix Trieu. [pdf]
• A Probabilistic Separation Logic. Gilles Barthe, Justin Hsu, Kevin Liao. [pdf]
• Relational Proofs for Quantum Programs. Gilles Barthe, Justin Hsu, Mingsheng Ying, Nengkun Yu, Li Zhou. [pdf]

MPI-SWS researchers, in collaboration with colleagues at TU Delft, the CISTER Research Centre at Polytechnic Institute of Porto, University of Saarland, Bosch Corporate Research, and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy, are proud to present three papers at this year's Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS) in Stuttgart, Germany. ECRTS is one of the three top-ranked conferences on real-time systems (according to Google Scholar Metrics, it is ranked number one).

• D. Casini, T. Blass, I. Lütkebohle, and B. Brandenburg, “Response-Time Analysis of ROS 2 Processing Chains under Reservation-Based Scheduling”, Proceedings of the 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019), pp. 6:1–6:23, July 2019. Open Access PDF
• A. Gujarati, M. Nasri, R. Majumdar, and B. Brandenburg, “From Iteration to System Failure: Characterizing the FITness of Periodic Weakly-Hard Systems”, Proceedings of the 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019), pp. 9:1–9:23, July 2019. Open Access PDF
• M. Nasri, G. Nelissen, and B. Brandenburg, “Response-Time Analysis of Limited-Preemptive Parallel DAG Tasks under Global Scheduling”, Proceedings of the 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019), pp. 21:1–21:23, July 2019. Open Access PDF

• Bridging the Gap Between Programming Languages and Hardware Weak Memory Models by Anton Podkopaev, Ori Lahav, and Viktor Vafeiadis.
• From Fine- to Coarse-Grained Dynamic Information Flow Control and Back by Marco Vassena, Alejandro Russo, Deepak Garg, Vineet Rajani, and Deian Stefan.
• Formal verification of higher-order probabilistic programs by Tetsuya Sato, Alejandro Aguirre, Gilles Barthe, Marco Gaboardi, Deepak Garg, Justin Hsu.
• Grounding Thin-Air Reads with Event Structures by Soham Chakraborty and Viktor Vafeiadis.
• On Library Correctness under Weak Memory Consistency by Azalea Raad, Marko Doko, Lovro Rožić, Ori Lahav, and Viktor Vafeiadis.

What's more, the MPI-SWS Software Analysis and Verification group has a whole session to itself at POPL 2019. The weak memory session on Thursday, Jan 17, is comprised of the three papers by Viktor Vafeiadis, his students, postdocs, and collaborators.

Four papers to appear at OOPSLA'18 have been (co)-authored by MPI-SWS members.

• Horn-ICE Learning for Synthesizing Invariants and Contracts. Deepak D'Souza, Ezudheen P, Pranav Garg, Daniel Neider, P. Madhusudan.
• Randomized Testing of Distributed Systems with Probabilistic Guarantees. Burcu Kulahcioglu Ozkan, Rupak Majumdar, Filip Niksic, Mitra Tabaei Befrouei, Georg Weissenbacher.
• Reconciling High-level Optimizations and Low-level Code in LLVM. Juneyoung Lee, Chung-Kil Hur, Ralf Jung, Zhengyang Liu, John Regehr, Nuno P. Lopes.
• Persistence Semantics for Weak Memory. Azalea Raad, Viktor Vafeiadis.

In 2018, MPI-SWS researchers authored a total of five POPL papers:

• Parametricity versus the Universal Type. Dominique Devriese, Marco Patrignani, Frank Piessens.
• Effective Stateless Model Checking for C/C++ Concurrency. Michalis Kokologiannakis, Ori Lahav, Kostis Sagonas, Viktor Vafeiadis.
• Monadic refinements for relational cost analysis. Ivan Radicek, Gilles Barthe, Marco Gaboardi, Deepak Garg, Florian Zuleger.
• Why is Random Testing Effective for Partition Tolerance Bugs? Rupak Majumdar, Filip Niksic.
• RustBelt: Securing the Foundations of the Rust Programming Language. Ralf Jung, Jacques-Henri Jourdan, Robbert Krebbers, Derek Dreyer.

Furthermore, with the "RustBelt" paper, MPI-SWS faculty member Derek Dreyer cements a 10-year streak of having at least one POPL paper each year, breaking the all-time record of 9 years previously held by John Mitchell at Stanford. Congratulations Derek!

The paper "A Broad View of the Ecosystem of Socially Engineered Exploit Documents" was accepted at NDSS '17 (Network and Distributed System Security Symposium).  The authors include Stevens Le Blond, Cédric Gilbert, Utkarsh Upadhyay, and Manuel Gomez Rodriguez from MPI-SWS, as well as David Choffnes from Northeastern University.

Our understanding of exploit documents as a vector to deliver targeted malware is limited to a handful of studies done in collaboration with the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and political dissidents in the Middle East. In this measurement study, we present a complementary methodology relying only on publicly available data to capture and analyze targeted attacks with both greater scale and depth. In particular, we detect exploit documents uploaded over one year to a large anti-virus aggregator (VirusTotal) and then mine the social engineering information they embed to infer their likely targets and contextual information of the attacks. We identify attacks against two ethnic groups (Tibet and Uyghur) as well as 12 countries spanning America, Asia, and Europe. We then analyze the exploit documents dynamically in sandboxes to correlate and compare the exploited vulnerabilities and malware families targeting different groups. Finally, we use machine learning to infer the role of the uploaders of these documents to VirusTotal (i.e., attacker, targeted victim, or third-party), which enables their classification based only on their metadata, without any dynamic analysis. We make our datasets available to the academic community.