The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Henry Taub Distinguished Visitor Lecture: With the formal verification of the seL4 microkernel, and subsequent work on assuring its safety and security properties, NICTA has recently not only demonstrated that unprecedented levels of assurance are possible, but also that the cost is competitive. In this talk I will examine what has been achieved, what the cost was, and how this might apply to larger systems, in particular the feasibility of assuring full-system safety or security. The result is cause for optimism.

Bio:
Gernot Heiser is Scientia Professor and John Lions Chair of Operating Systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and leads the Software Systems Research Group at NICTA, Australia's National Centre of Excellence for ICT Research. He joined NICTA at its creation in 2002, and before that was a full-time member of academic staff at UNSW from 1991. His past work included the Mungi single-address-space operating system (OS), several un-broken records in IPC performance, and the best-ever reported performance for user-level device drivers. More recently he led the team at NICTA which produced the world's first formal proof of functional correctness of a protected general-purpose operating-system kernel, the first published sound worst-case execution time analysis of a protected OS kernel, and the synthesis of high-performance device drivers.