Report on the NSF Workshop on Formal Methods for Security

The NSF workshop on Security and Formal Methods, held 19–20 November 2015, brought together developers of formal methods, researchers exploring how to apply formal methods to various kinds of systems, and people familiar with the security problem space. Participants were drawn from universities, industry research organizations, government, and a selected pool of scientists from foreign institutions. We explored how current research results and strategies can provide improved secure systems using contemporary formal methods, and how these goals can shape future refinements to formal methods.

The workshop was organized into four main areas: (i) Hardware architecture, (ii) Operating systems, (iii) Distributed systems, and (iv) Privacy. Each area had an expert area chair (or pair of chairs), who guided discussion and helped to write a section of the report below. Participants were assigned to an area for part of the workshop, with whole group sessions and cross-cutting groups to consider interactions among abstraction layers.