Last week I attended ETAPS 2019, where I did a presentation at SPIOT19 (workshop on Workshop on Security practices for Internet of Things). That workshop was just a one-day event, but I took advantage of the situation and stuck around for the main conferences. Given my interests I mainly attended the TACAS conference. T

SPIOT

The week started with my presentation at SPIOT sunday. The workshop was fairly small. In fact, I believe there were only three accepted papers there, 1 invited talk and two talks by the organisers. It is the first time for me to attend such a small workshop, but I think it opened up for more engaging discussions during my presentation.

TACAS

As already mentioned I attended the TACAS conference and naturally attended the keynotes of ETAPS. Before going to TACAS I had been wondering if the Boeing 737-Max incident would be brought up at the conference. The first keynote speaker (Marsha Chechik) brought it up approximately ten minutes into to her talk. Naturally just as an argument for why formal mehthods are needed. It was a very nice talk, though I will not talk about it in depth.

Another great talk was by Kathleen Fisher. She talked about using formal methods for asserting software do not have exploitable bugs – or rather she argued that it was the time for pushing formal methods into industry. Furthermore she discussed case studies where formal methods specialists had been involved with protecting a system (a quad-copter) from exploitable bugs. Another case study involved a UAV.