Research Associate in Formal Modelling and Verification

www.findapprenticeship.service.gov.uk - Jobboard; Sheffield; On-site; GBP 30,000 - 42,000; Full time

Job summary

A prestigious research university in Sheffield seeks a Postdoctoral Research Associate to conduct research on safety and security in advanced hardware architectures. Candidates must demonstrate strong research capabilities and software development skills, with a preference for familiarity with proof assistants like Isabelle/HOL. Join a dynamic team that collaborates with industry and academic partners on cutting-edge projects.

Qualifications

• Ability to conduct high-quality research.
• Excellent skills in developing software and performing formal verification.
• Familiarity with proof assistants is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Conduct research on safety and security of advanced hardware architectures.
• Develop formal models using the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant.
• Collaborate with leading researchers.

Skills

High-quality research

Software development

Formal verification

Familiarity with proof assistants

Isabelle/HOL proof assistant

Education

PhD in relevant field

Job description

University of Sheffield
Are you interested in working for a world top 100 university, performing cutting edge research in formal verification?

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research associate on the EPSRC-funded project “Safe and secure COncurrent programming for adVancEd aRchiTectures (COVERT)”. The post is based in Sheffield within the verification group of the School of Computer Science at

This post requires an ability to conduct high-quality research. It also requires excellent skills on developing software and/or performing formal verification. Familiarity with a proof assistant is a plus. Familiarity with the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant is a big plus.

The project aims to conduct research into the safety and security of advanced hardware architectures. These advanced architectures break assumptions that programmers have relied on, causing new safety bugs and security vulnerabilities. We will target multi-processor systems and concurrent architectures. Concurrent behaviour is notoriously difficult – incorrect synchronisation can lead to many dangerous safety and security vulnerabilities (see the Common Weaknesses database), ranging from “out-of-bounds writes” and “use-after-free” errors to “improper synchronisation and race conditions”. Further, architecture-based attacks (e.g., Spectre) show the urgency of addressing these important problems today. Even when low-level programs are well synchronised, the design of the underlying concurrent algorithms can themselves be vulnerable. In particular, well understood safety conditions such as linearizability do not guarantee security, and current approaches to addressing this issue lead to overly synchronised implementations (degrading performance). This introduces a tension between the goals of the hardware designers (who aim to maximise performance), and end users (who require trustworthy software). In the middle are developers, who are tasked with producing software that balances this tension.

In this project, you will join a team of researchers to build mechanisms for provably correct reusable abstractions that maximise flexibility in program design, allowing finetuning of both safety and security guarantees based on the architecture. Formal models for the advanced architectures will be developed using the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant, and safety and security properties and their interplay will be studied for these models. You will also have the opportunity to collaborate with leading researchers from Kent and Surrey. Finally, the project benefits from working with a number of academic, industrial and governmental partners: ARM, Galois, Defence Science and Technology (DST) and the Universities of Amsterdam, Augsburg, Melbourne and Oldenburg.