Engaged in Dialogue: BI at Numerous Conferences in the last Quarter of 2025
Our researchers present their work at conferences to engage an international expert audience, receive feedback, and gain new insights through scientific exchange. In the last quarter of 2025, they were once again active at numerous conferences.
Two examples of BI’s international activities in the fourth quarter of 2025 are the PLOS Conference and the ACSAC Conference.
13th Workshop on Programming Language and Operating Systems (PLOS)
At the 13th Workshop on Programming Language and Operating Systems (PLOS) in Seoul, South Korea, on October 13, 2025, BI researcher Dr. Carmine Abate from our research group Verified System Design Automation presented the paper "Debug, Execute, Verify! Development-Verification Co-design Made Practical".
The paper presents a framework for the Rust programming language that utilizes symbolic program execution to bridge the gap between development and verification.
Dr. Nicholas Gordon from our research group Composable Operating Systems presented the paper "Applying Modern Verification Techniques to a Root-of-Trust Bootloader".
The paper is an experience report about using formal verification, that is, mathematical proofs, to ensure software correctness in a practical scenario. It investigates how existing Rust programs can be verified with Verus, focusing on a critical startup component of the M³ operating system. By adding verification statements to the code, it shows that initial properties of this component can be proven.
The workshop was co-located with the 31st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). Members of Barkhausen Institut attended this conference and engaged in scientific exchange with the system community.
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)
At the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, from December 8-12, 2025, our researcher Jana Eisoldt presented the paper "A cloudy view on trust relationships of CVMs: How Confidential Virtual Machines are falling short in Public Cloud".
Confidential computing aims to protect data in the cloud by running it in special secure environments where even the cloud provider cannot access it. A key feature is remote attestation, which lets customers verify that the system is in a secure and unchanged state before their data is processed.
The paper examines whether major cloud providers truly follow these principles. It considers how their Confidential Virtual Machines - highly protected cloud environments that shield data from unauthorized access even during processing. What security guarantees do they provide to users? How much control do the providers continue to retain? The authors find that cloud providers keep control over important parts of the system and sometimes interfere with the attestation process. This contradicts the core principle of confidential computing, which requires the cloud provider not to be part of the trusted system.
Additional Conferences Attended by the Barkhausen Institut (selection):
- 13th workshop on Programming Language and Operating Systems on October 13, 2025, in Seoul, South Korea
- IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference from October 19-22, 2025, in Chengdu, China
- 23rd IEEE International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing from October 21-24, 2025, in Hokkaido, Japan
- 59th Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers from October 26-29, 2025, held on the Asilomar Grounds in Pacific Grove, CA, USA
- 27th International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems from October 27-31, 2025, in Barcelona, Spain
- 25th International Conference on Control, Automation, and Systems from November 4-7, 2025, in Incheon, Korea
- 32nd IEEE International Conference on Electronics Circuits and Systems from November 17-19, 2025, in Marrakech, Morocco
- Annual Computer Security Applications Conference from December 8-12, 2025, in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
- 18th IEEE International Symposium on Embedded Multicore/Many-core Systems-on-Chip from December 15-18, 2025, at the Newcastle Australia Institute of Higher Education in Singapore