Paulo Silva

I am a Post-Doctorate researcher in the BestCase project at HASLab/INESC TEC - University of Minho. My research interests are related to my personal view that mathematical reasoning and techniques are essential to avoid software errors and to produce high-quality source code. However, I think that this will not be possible without the development of the appropriate tools which implement these techniques and provide a practical support to programmers.

I hold a degree in Computer Engineering in 2004 and a PhD in Computer Science in 2009, both awarded by the University of Minho. I have worked in several research projects, where I tried to make formal methods more amenable for everyday use by software developers, mostly by proving some degree of automation. My work as Post-Doctorate researcher at Computer Aided Cryptography Engineering (CACE) and Secure Memories and Applications Related Technologies (SMART) european projects has been developing Domain Specific Languages (DSL’s) and respective tools, in order to ensure formal validation and certification of cryptographic software implementations, resorting to dependent types and static analysis, among other techniques. I am currently working in the BestCase project where my objective is to further improve the CAO language framework, a DSL aimed at writing cryptographic software in a higher abstraction level which is then transformed and compiled to the C language, while preserving the overall safety properties.