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POPL 2021
Sun 17 - Fri 22 January 2021 Online

Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP) is an international conference on practical and theoretical topics in all areas that consider formal verification and certification as an essential paradigm for their work. CPP spans areas of computer science, mathematics, logic, and education. CPP is sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN, in cooperation with ACM SIGLOG.

CPP 2021 will be co-located with POPL 2021 and will take place on January 17-19, 2021 (extended), as a virtual meeting, where all papers are presented online. The main room of the conference will be streamed on YouTube.

Our Call for Participation and Lightning Talks is available and registration is open.

We also offer a $10 discounted registration fee for anyone for whom the normal registration fees could be an impediment to participation. Finally, we would like to warmly thank our generous industrial supporters below:
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Dates
Tracks
Plenary
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Sun 17 Jan

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

15:30 - 16:00
15:30
30m
Social Event
Sunday Breakfast Tables
Workshops and Co-located Events

16:00 - 17:00
Invited TalkCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Cătălin Hriţcu MPI-SP

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/PAxUO84tUE8

16:00
60m
Talk
Invited Talk: Teaching Algorithms and Data Structures with a Proof Assistant
CPP
Tobias Nipkow Technische Universität München
Media Attached File Attached
17:00 - 17:30
Proof TacticsCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Jesper Cockx TU Delft

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/PAxUO84tUE8?t=3781

17:00
15m
Talk
A Novice-Friendly Induction Tactic for Lean
CPP
Jannis Limperg Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Pre-print Media Attached
17:15
15m
Talk
Lassie: HOL4 Tactics by Example
CPP
Heiko Becker MPI-SWS, Nathaniel Bos McGill University, Ivan Gavran MPI-SWS, Eva Darulova MPI-SWS, Rupak Majumdar MPI-SWS
Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
17:30 - 18:00
17:30
30m
Break
Sunday Coffee Break
Workshops and Co-located Events

18:00 - 18:45
Logic, Set Theory, and Category TheoryCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Yannick Forster Saarland University

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/U_ZT9hfDAUQ

18:00
15m
Talk
An Anti-Locally-Nameless Approach to Formalizing Quantifiers
CPP
Olivier Laurent CNRS & ENS Lyon
Pre-print Media Attached
18:15
15m
Talk
The Generalised Continuum Hypothesis Implies the Axiom of Choice in Coq
CPP
Dominik Kirst Saarland University, Felix Rech Saarland University
Pre-print Media Attached
18:30
15m
Talk
Formalizing Category Theory in Agda
CPP
Jason Z.S. Hu McGill University, Jacques Carette McMaster University
Pre-print Media Attached
18:45 - 19:30
Formalized MathematicsCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Amin Timany Aarhus University

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/U_ZT9hfDAUQ?t=2768

18:45
15m
Talk
Formalizing the Ring of Witt VectorsDistinguished Paper Award
CPP
Johan Commelin Universität Freiburg, Robert Y. Lewis Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Pre-print Media Attached
19:00
15m
Talk
Formal Verification of Semi-algebraic Sets and Real Analytic Functions
CPP
J Tanner Slagel NASA Langley Research Center, Lauren White Kansas State University, Aaron Dutle NASA Langley Research Center
Pre-print Media Attached
19:15
15m
Talk
On the Formalisation of Kolmogorov Complexity
CPP
Elliot Catt ANU, Michael Norrish Data61, CSIRO & ANU
Pre-print Media Attached
19:30 - 20:00
19:30
30m
Social Event
Sunday Hallway Time
Workshops and Co-located Events

20:00 - 21:00
Virtual CPP dinnerCPP at CPP

Mon 18 Jan

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

15:30 - 16:00
15:30
30m
Social Event
Topic Oriented Discussions
Workshops and Co-located Events

17:00 - 17:30
Program LogicsCPP at CPP
Chair(s): William Mansky University of Illinois at Chicago

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/poHYVOMQuro?t=3869

17:00
15m
Talk
Contextual Refinement of the Michael-Scott Queue (Proof Pearl)
CPP
Simon Friis Vindum Aarhus University, Lars Birkedal Aarhus University
Pre-print Media Attached
17:15
15m
Talk
Reasoning About Monotonicity in Separation Logic
CPP
Amin Timany Aarhus University, Lars Birkedal Aarhus University
Pre-print Media Attached
17:30 - 18:00
17:30
30m
Break
Monday Coffee Break 2
Workshops and Co-located Events

18:00 - 18:45
SemanticsCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Yannick Zakowski Inria

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/Qak5mK92etU

18:00
15m
Talk
A Coq Formalization of Data Provenance
CPP
Véronique Benzaken Université Paris Saclay, Sarah Cohen-Boulakia LRI, Université de Paris Sud, CNRS (UMR8623) - Université Paris Saclay, Evelyne Contejean CNRS, Chantal Keller LRI, Univ. Paris-Sud, Rébecca Zucchini LRI, Université de Paris Sud, CNRS (UMR8623) - Université Paris Saclay
Pre-print Media Attached
18:15
15m
Talk
Developing and certifying Datalog optimizations in Coq/MathComp
CPP
Pierre-Léo Bégay Orange Labs & Verimag, Pierre Crégut Orange Labs, Jean-François Monin Verimag
Pre-print Media Attached
18:30
15m
Talk
Machine-Checked Semantic Session TypingDistinguished Paper Award
CPP
Jonas Kastberg Hinrichsen IT University of Copenhagen, Daniël Louwrink University of Amsterdam, Robbert Krebbers Radboud University Nijmegen, Jesper Bengtson IT University of Copenhagen
Pre-print Media Attached
18:45 - 19:30
Security, Blockchains, and Smart ContractsCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Andreas Lochbihler Digital Asset

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/Qak5mK92etU?t=2832

18:45
15m
Talk
Extracting Smart Contracts Tested and Verified in Coq
CPP
Danil Annenkov Concordium Blockchain Research Center, Aarhus University, Mikkel Milo Concordium Blockchain Research Center, Aarhus University, Jakob Botsch Nielsen Concordium Blockchain Research Center, Aarhus University, Bas Spitters Concordium Blockchain Research Center, Aarhus University
Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
19:00
15m
Talk
Formal Verification of Authenticated, Append-Only Skip Lists in Agda
CPP
Victor Cacciari Miraldo DFINITY Foundation, Harold Carr Oracle Labs, USA, Mark Moir Oracle Labs, New Zealand, Lisandra Silva University of Minho, Guy L. Steele Jr. Oracle Labs
Pre-print Media Attached
19:15
15m
Talk
Towards formally verified compilation of tag-based policy enforcement
CPP
CHR Chhak Portland State University, Andrew Tolmach Portland State University, Sean Anderson Portland State University
Pre-print Media Attached
19:30 - 20:00
19:30
30m
Social Event
Monday Shuffle-Space Time
Workshops and Co-located Events

20:00 - 21:00
Lightning TalksCPP / CPP Lightning Talks at CPP
Chair(s): Natarajan Shankar SRI International, USA

Streamed sessions: https://youtu.be/sFMJBTtbjTc

20:00
5m
Talk
Certified Semantics for miniKanren
CPP Lightning Talks
Dmitry Rozplokhas Saint Petersburg State University and JetBrains Research, Andrey Vyatkin Saint Petersburg State University, Petr Lozov Sain Petersburg State University, SPbGU, Dmitri Boulytchev Saint Petersburg State University / JetBrains Research
Media Attached
20:05
5m
Talk
Cameleer: a Deductive Verification Tool for OCaml
CPP Lightning Talks
Mário Pereira NOVA LINCS & Nova School of Sciences and Tecnhology, António Ravara Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, NOVA University of Lisbon and NOVA LINCS
20:10
5m
Talk
Gradualizing the Calculus of Inductive Constructions
CPP Lightning Talks
Meven Lennon-Bertrand Inria – LS2N, Université de Nantes, Kenji Maillard Inria Nantes & University of Chile, Nicolas Tabareau Inria, Éric Tanter University of Chile
Pre-print
20:15
5m
Talk
Formally Verified Decentralized Exchange with Mi-Cho-Coq
CPP Lightning Talks
Arvid Jakobsson Nomadic Labs, Colin González Université de Paris, Irif -- Nomadic Labs, Bruno Bernardo Nomadic Labs, Raphaël Cauderlier Nomadic Labs
20:20
5m
Talk
A semantic domain for privacy-aware smart contracts and interoperable sharded ledgers
CPP Lightning Talks
Sören Bleikertz Digital Asset, Andreas Lochbihler Digital Asset, Ognjen Marić Digital Asset, Simon Meier Digital Asset, Phoebe Nichols Digital Asset, Matthias Schmalz Digital Asset, Ratko G. Veprek Digital Asset
File Attached
20:25
5m
Talk
Specification and model checking of Tendermint consensus in TLA+
CPP Lightning Talks
Igor Konnov Informal Systems Inc, Zarko Milosevic Informal Systems, Josef Widder Informal Systems
20:30
5m
Talk
Formalization of Combinatorics on Words in Isabelle/HOL
CPP Lightning Talks
Štěpán Holub Charles University, Štěpán Starosta Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague
Link to publication Media Attached File Attached
20:35
5m
Talk
Formalising MPC-in-the-head-based zero-knowledge
CPP Lightning Talks
Nikolaj Sidorenco Aarhus University, Sabine Oechsner Aarhus University, Bas Spitters Concordium Blockchain Research Center, Aarhus University
File Attached
20:40
5m
Talk
Mechanically-checked soundness of type-based null safety
CPP Lightning Talks
Alexander Kogtenkov Schaffhausen Institute of Technology, Switzerland
Media Attached File Attached
20:45
5m
Talk
Formalising MiniSail in Isabelle
CPP Lightning Talks
Mark Wassell University of Cambridge
20:50
5m
Talk
How to verify an ASN.1 Protocol C-language Stack in Coq?
CPP Lightning Talks
Nika Pona Digamma.ai, Vadim Zaliva Carnegie Mellon University, USA
File Attached
20:55
5m
Talk
Monadic Second-Order Logic and Pomset Languages
CPP Lightning Talks
Tobias Kappé Cornell University

Tue 19 Jan

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

15:30 - 16:00
15:30
30m
Social Event
Tuesday Shuffle-Space Time
Workshops and Co-located Events

16:00 - 16:45
Compilers and InterpretersCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Freek Wiedijk Radboud University Nijmegen

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/TVqCuMMTuos

16:00
15m
Talk
A Minimalistic Verified Bootstrapped Compiler (Proof Pearl)Distinguished Paper Award
CPP
Magnus O. Myreen Chalmers University of Technology
Pre-print Media Attached
16:15
15m
Talk
Lutsig: A Verified Verilog Compiler for Verified Circuit Development
CPP
Andreas Lööw Chalmers University of Technology
Pre-print Media Attached
16:30
15m
Talk
Towards Efficient and Verified Virtual Machines for Dynamic Languages
CPP
Martin Desharnais Universität der Bundeswehr München, Stefan Brunthaler Universität der Bundeswehr München
Pre-print Media Attached
16:45 - 17:30
Rewriting and Automated ReasoningCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Cyril Cohen Université Côte d’Azur, Inria, France

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/TVqCuMMTuos?t=2806

16:45
15m
Talk
A Modular Isabelle Framework for Verifying Saturation Provers
CPP
Sophie Tourret Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Jasmin Blanchette Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Pre-print Media Attached
17:00
15m
Talk
An Isabelle/HOL Formalization of AProVE's Termination Method for LLVM IR
CPP
Max W. Haslbeck University of Innsbruck, René Thiemann University of Innsbruck
Pre-print Media Attached
17:15
15m
Talk
A Verified Decision Procedure for the First-Order Theory of Rewriting for Linear Variable-Separated Rewrite Systems
CPP
Alexander Lochmann University of Innsbruck, Aart Middeldorp University of Innsbruck, Fabian Mitterwallner University of Innsbruck, Bertram Felgenhauer
Pre-print Media Attached
17:30 - 18:00
17:30
30m
Break
Tuesday Coffee Break 2
Workshops and Co-located Events

18:00 - 18:30
AI and Machine LearningCPP at CPP
Chair(s): Ekaterina Komendantskaya Heriot-Watt University, UK

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/6NJdWdiZEiA

18:00
15m
Talk
A Formal Proof of PAC Learnability for Decision Stumps
CPP
Joseph Tassarotti Boston College, Koundinya Vajjha University of Pittsburgh, Anindya Banerjee IMDEA Software Institute, Jean-Baptiste Tristan Boston College
Pre-print Media Attached
18:15
15m
Talk
CertRL: Formalizing Convergence Proofs for Value and Policy Iteration in Coq
CPP
Koundinya Vajjha University of Pittsburgh, Avraham Shinnar IBM Research, Barry Trager IBM Research, Vasily Pestun IBM Research; IHES, Nathan Fulton IBM Research
Pre-print Media Attached
18:30 - 19:30
Chairs' report and community meetingCPP at CPP

Streamed session: https://youtu.be/6NJdWdiZEiA?t=2150

18:30
60m
Talk
Chairs' report and community meeting
CPP
Cătălin Hriţcu MPI-SP, Andrei Popescu University of Sheffield, Lennart Beringer Princeton University
Media Attached File Attached
19:30 - 20:00
19:30
30m
Break
Welcome to Copenhagen!
Workshops and Co-located Events

Accepted Papers

Title
A Coq Formalization of Data Provenance
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
A Formal Proof of PAC Learnability for Decision Stumps
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
A Minimalistic Verified Bootstrapped Compiler (Proof Pearl)Distinguished Paper Award
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
A Modular Isabelle Framework for Verifying Saturation Provers
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
An Anti-Locally-Nameless Approach to Formalizing Quantifiers
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
An Isabelle/HOL Formalization of AProVE's Termination Method for LLVM IR
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
A Novice-Friendly Induction Tactic for Lean
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
A Verified Decision Procedure for the First-Order Theory of Rewriting for Linear Variable-Separated Rewrite Systems
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
CertRL: Formalizing Convergence Proofs for Value and Policy Iteration in Coq
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Chairs' report and community meeting
CPP
Media Attached File Attached
Contextual Refinement of the Michael-Scott Queue (Proof Pearl)
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Developing and certifying Datalog optimizations in Coq/MathComp
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Extracting Smart Contracts Tested and Verified in Coq
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
Formalizing Category Theory in Agda
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Formalizing the Ring of Witt VectorsDistinguished Paper Award
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Formal Verification of Authenticated, Append-Only Skip Lists in Agda
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Formal Verification of Semi-algebraic Sets and Real Analytic Functions
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Lassie: HOL4 Tactics by Example
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached File Attached
Lutsig: A Verified Verilog Compiler for Verified Circuit Development
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Machine-Checked Semantic Session TypingDistinguished Paper Award
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
On the Formalisation of Kolmogorov Complexity
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Reasoning About Monotonicity in Separation Logic
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
The Generalised Continuum Hypothesis Implies the Axiom of Choice in Coq
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Towards Efficient and Verified Virtual Machines for Dynamic Languages
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached
Towards formally verified compilation of tag-based policy enforcement
CPP
Pre-print Media Attached

Call for Papers

Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP) is an international conference on practical and theoretical topics in all areas that consider formal verification and certification as an essential paradigm for their work. CPP spans areas of computer science, mathematics, logic, and education.

CPP 2021 will be held on 17-19 January 2021 and will be co-located with POPL 2021. CPP 2021 is sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN, in cooperation with ACM SIGLOG.

News

  • CPP 2021 will take place on January 17-19, 2021 as a virtual meeting, where all papers are presented online.

  • CPP 2021 will feature Distinguished Paper Awards.

  • The submission deadline is one month earlier than usual.

Important Dates

  • Abstract Deadline: 16 September 2020 at 23:59 AoE (UTC-12h)
  • Paper Submission Deadline: 22 September 2020 at 23:59 AoE (UTC-12h)
  • Notification: 24 November 2020
  • Camera Ready Deadline: 15 December 2020
  • Conference: 17-19 January 2021 (extended)

Deadlines expire at the end of the day, anywhere on earth. Abstract and submission deadlines are strict and there will be no extensions.

Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions in research areas related to formal certification of programs and proofs. The following is a non-exhaustive list of topics of interest to CPP:

  • certified or certifying programming, compilation, linking, OS kernels, runtime systems, security monitors, and hardware;
  • certified mathematical libraries and mathematical theorems;
  • proof assistants (e.g, ACL2, Agda, Coq, Dafny, F*, HOL4, HOL Light, Idris, Isabelle, Lean, Mizar, Nuprl, PVS, etc);
  • new languages and tools for certified programming;
  • program analysis, program verification, and program synthesis;
  • program logics, type systems, and semantics for certified code;
  • logics for certifying concurrent and distributed systems;
  • mechanized metatheory, formalized programming language semantics, and logical frameworks;
  • higher-order logics, dependent type theory, proof theory, logical systems, separation logics, and logics for security;
  • verification of correctness and security properties;
  • formally verified blockchains and smart contracts;
  • certificates for decision procedures, including linear algebra, polynomial systems, SAT, SMT, and unification in algebras of interest;
  • certificates for semi-decision procedures, including equality, first-order logic, and higher-order unification;
  • certificates for program termination;
  • formal models of computation;
  • mechanized (un)decidability and computational complexity proofs;
  • formally certified methods for induction and coinduction;
  • integration of interactive and automated provers;
  • logical foundations of proof assistants;
  • applications of AI and machine learning to formal certification;
  • user interfaces for proof assistants and theorem provers;
  • teaching mathematics and computer science with proof assistants.

Distinguished Paper Awards

Around 10% of the accepted papers at CPP 2021 will be designated as Distinguished Papers. This award highlights papers that the CPP program committee thinks should be read by a broad audience due to their relevance, originality, significance and clarity.

Submission Guidelines

Prior to the abstract deadline, the authors should register their paper in the HotCRP system at https://cpp2021.hotcrp.com by entering the title, abstract (entered as plain text in the corresponding field of the registration form), authors, affiliations, topics, and conflicts. No PDF upload is needed at registration time, see next paragraph.

Prior to the paper submission deadline, the authors should also upload their anonymized paper in PDF format through the HotCRP system. Any PDF uploaded into HotCRP is immediately visible to the PC and uploading a non-anonymous PDF at any time is grounds for desk rejection of your paper.

The submissions must be written in English and provide sufficient detail to allow the program committee to assess the merits of the contribution. They must be formatted following the ACM SIGPLAN Proceedings format using the acmart style with the sigplan option, which provides a two-column style, using 10 point font for the main text, and a header for double blind review submission, i.e.,

\documentclass[sigplan,10pt,anonymous,review]{acmart}\settopmatter{printfolios=true,printccs=false,printacmref=false}

The submitted papers should not exceed 12 pages, including tables and figures, but excluding bibliography and clearly marked appendices. The papers should be self-contained without the appendices. Shorter papers are welcome and will be given equal consideration. Submissions not conforming to the requirements concerning format and maximum length may be rejected without further consideration.

CPP 2021 will employ a lightweight double-blind reviewing process. To facilitate this, the submissions must adhere to two rules:

  1. author names and institutions must be omitted, and

  2. references to authors’ own related work should be in the third person (e.g., not “We build on our previous work …” but rather “We build on the work of …").

The purpose of this process is to help the PC and external reviewers come to an initial judgment about the paper without bias, not to make it impossible for them to discover the authors if they were to try. Nothing should be done in the name of anonymity that weakens the submission or makes the job of reviewing it more difficult. In particular, important background references should not be omitted or anonymized. In addition, authors are free to disseminate their ideas or draft versions of their papers as usual. For example, authors may post drafts of their papers on the web or give talks on their research ideas. POPL has answers to frequently asked questions addressing many common concerns: https://popl20.sigplan.org/track/POPL-2020-Research-Papers#Submission-and-Reviewing-FAQ

We strongly encourage the authors to provide any supplementary material that is required to support the claims made in the paper, such as proof scripts or experimental data. This material must be uploaded at submission time, as an archive, not via a URL. Two forms of supplementary material may be submitted:

  • Anonymous supplementary material is made available to the reviewers before they submit their first-draft reviews.

  • Non-anonymous supplementary material is made available to the reviewers after they have submitted their first-draft reviews and have learned the identity of the authors.

Please use anonymous supplementary material whenever possible, so that it can be taken into account from the beginning of the reviewing process.

The submitted papers must adhere to the SIGPLAN Republication Policy and the ACM Policy on Plagiarism. Concurrent submissions to other conferences, journals, workshops with proceedings, or similar forums of publication are not allowed. The PC chairs should be informed of closely related work submitted to a conference or journal in advance of submission.

One author of each accepted paper is expected to present it at the virtual conference.

Publication, Copyright, and Open Access

The limit for the camera-ready version is 14 pages, excluding appendices of up to 5 pages (which should be clearly marked and appear before the references) and references. This is 2 pages extra for the paper body compared to the submission.

The CPP proceedings will be published by the ACM, and authors of accepted papers will be required to choose one of the following publication options:

  1. Author retains copyright of the work and grants ACM a non-exclusive permission-to-publish license and, optionally, licenses the work under a Creative Commons license.

  2. Author retains copyright of the work and grants ACM an exclusive permission-to-publish license.

  3. Author transfers copyright of the work to ACM.

For authors who can afford it, we recommend option 1, which will make your paper Gold Open Access, and also encourage such authors to license their work under the CC-BY license. ACM will charge you an article processing fee for this option (currently, US$700 for SIGPLAN members), which you have to pay directly with the ACM. You may be able to avoid this fee if the institution of the corresponding author is a member of “ACM OPEN” (so please choose the corresponding author wisely).

For everyone else, we recommend option 2, which is free and allows you to achieve Green Open Access, by uploading a preprint of your paper to a repository that guarantees permanent archival such as arXiv, HAL, or eprint. This is anyway a good idea for timely dissemination even if you chose option 1. Ensuring timely dissemination is particularly important for this edition, since, because of the very tight schedule, the official proceedings might not be available in time for CPP.

The official CPP 2021 proceedings will also be available via SIGPLAN OpenTOC.

For ACM’s take on this, see their Copyright Policy and Author Rights.

Contact

For any questions please contact the two PC chairs: Catalin Hritcu and Andrei Popescu

Call for Participation and Lightning Talks

Executive Summary

  • Conference dates: 17-19 January 2021 (extended to 3 days!)
  • Lightning talks submission deadline: 8 January 2021 (AoE)
  • Lightning talks session: 18 January 2021 at 20:00 CET
  • Registration
    • Early registration deadline: 10 January 2021(!)
    • Discounted registration available (see below)
  • Long pre-recorded talks available by the end of 11 January 2021 (AoE)

General Information

Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP) is an international conference on practical and theoretical topics in all areas that consider formal verification and certification as an essential paradigm. CPP spans areas of computer science, mathematics, logic, and education. CPP is sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN, in cooperation with ACM SIGLOG. For more information please visit the CPP page.

CPP 2021 will be co-located with POPL 2021 and will take place on 17-19 January 2021, as a virtual meeting, where all papers are presented online. For more information about virtual conference organization have a look here. CPP will also have both long and short versions of presentations, just that for us the short versions are 10 minutes long (not 5). The short presentation versions will be given during the virtual conference, and the authors have a choice between giving this live or playing the pre-recording. The long presentations (30 minutes) will be pre-recorded and made available for asynchronous consumption before the conference, by the end of 11 January 2021 (AoE).

Call for Lightning Talks

CPP 2021 will include a session of 5-minute talks where attendees can present work-in-progress, preliminary research results, and emerging topics. Submission of such lightning talks proposals is lightweight: all we need is a title, an abstract, and the author names, affiliations, and contact information.

Lightning talks will be given live via Zoom and the 5 minute limit will be strictly enforced (and there will be no Q&A). You need to be a registered participant to give a lightning talk at CPP, but there is also a $10 registration option (see below).

Discounted Registration

We offer a $10 alternative registration fee for anyone for whom the normal registration fees could be an impediment to participation.

Industrial Supporters

Warm thanks to our generous industrial supporters:

Invited Talks

Accepted Papers, Program, and Distinguished Paper Awards

The list of papers accepted at CPP 2021 is available here.

A preliminary program is also available here.

Starting with this edition we introduced the CPP Distinguished Paper Awards, aimed at accepted submissions that stand out with respect to originality, significance, and clarity. The three Distinguished Papers selected for CPP 2021 are:

Contact

For any questions please contact the chairs: Catalin Hritcu (catalin.hritcu@gmail.com), Andrei Popescu (a.popescu@sheffield.ac.uk), Lennart Beringer (eberinge@cs.princeton.edu)

Supporting CPP

The ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP) covers all areas that consider formal verification and certification as an essential paradigm for their work. CPP spans areas of computer science, mathematics, logic, and education and brings together 100+ researchers and practitioners to present the latest developments in formal verification.

CPP welcomes corporate donations to help maintain and improve the overall experience at the conference. The money we get from corporate sponsors will generally be used to subsidize student attendance (e.g., registration waiving, which generally increases student participation), to pay for live streaming and recording CPP, facilitate online interaction, and introduce a new distinguished paper award. This will also allow us explore new ideas such as covering the fees that would make CPP open access for everyone.

News

  • CPP 2021 will take place on January 17-19, 2021 as a virtual meeting, where all papers are presented online.

CPP Support Levels

Bronze – Suggested donation $1000

  • your name and logo prominently displayed on the CPP website
  • acknowledgment in the CPP PC chairs’ statement for the proceedings
  • a dedicated text chat room in the messaging system
  • big thank you in the CPP chairs’ report talk
  • one complementary registration to CPP (17-19 January 2021)

Silver – Suggested donation $2500

  • as above plus:
  • logo will be displayed on the splash screen before each talk video
  • a dedicated videoconference room to interact with attendees for the duration of CPP (17-19 January 2021).
  • two complementary registrations to CPP (17-19 January 2021)

Gold – Suggested donation $5000

  • as above plus:
  • acknowledgement as a sponsor of the CPP keynote talks
  • an opportunity for a representative from the company to address the attendees for 10 minutes (immediately before or after the chairs’ report or in case of a physical conference at the start of the conference dinner)
  • four complementary registrations to CPP (17-19 January 2021)

Sponsorship Policy

Sponsors help offset the considerable expense involved in staging the conference, reducing the financial barriers to participation and enhancing inclusivity. We aim to foster a diverse community with participants from varied disciplines, organizations, and geographic locations. We value and encourage participation from across academia, industry, government, and civil society. At the same time, outside contributions can raise concerns about the independence of the conference and the legitimacy the conference may confer on sponsors. We take these concerns seriously and have taken steps to maintain a transparent and appropriate relationship with our sponsors:

  • We acknowledge all sources of financial support.
  • We disclose all benefits that sponsors receive in exchange for their contribution.
  • We ensure that sponsors have no say over the paper selection process, the composition of the program committees, the choice of invited speakers, or the selection of award winners. The substance and structure of the conference are determined independently by the program committee using a rigorous, lightweight double-blind peer review process.
  • We only allow sponsors to contribute to a general fund and do not allow sponsors to further specify how their contributions should be spent.

We are grateful to receive financial support from organizations that respect our twin goals of inclusivity and independence.

Acknowledgment: CPP’s sponsorship policy is adapted from the ACM FAccT conference and used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

Contact

Questions about how to support CPP may be directed to Lennart Beringer <eberingeATcs.princeton.edu>

Previous CPP conferences

  • CPP 2020, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, January 20-21, 2020 (co-located with POPL’20)
  • CPP 2019, Cascais/Lisbon, Portugal, January 14-15, 2019 (co-located with POPL’19)
  • CPP 2018, Los Angeles, USA, January 8-9, 2018 (co-located with POPL’18)
  • CPP 2017, Paris, France, January 16-17, 2017 (co-located with POPL’17)
  • CPP 2016, Saint Petersburg, Florida, USA, January 18-19, 2016 (co-located with POPL’16)
  • CPP 2015, Mumbai, India, January 13-14, 2015 (co-located with POPL’15)
  • CPP 2013, Melbourne, Australia, December 11-13, 2013 (co-located with APLAS’13)
  • CPP 2012, Kyoto, Japan, December 13-15, 2012 (collocation with APLAS’12)
  • CPP 2011, Kenting, Taiwan, December 7-9, 2011 (co-located with APLAS’11)

The CPP Manifesto (from 2011)

In this manifesto, we advocate for the creation of a new international conference in the area of formal methods and programming languages, called Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP). Certification here means formal, mechanized verification of some sort, preferably with the production of independently checkable certificates. CPP would target any research promoting formal development of certified software and proofs, that is:

  • The development of certified or certifying programs
  • The development of certified mathematical theories
  • The development of new languages and tools for certified programming
  • New program logics, type systems, and semantics for certified code
  • New automated or interactive tools and provers for certification
  • Results assessed by an original open source formal development
  • Original teaching material based on a proof assistant

Software today is still developed without precise specification. A developer often starts the programming task with a rather informal specification. After careful engineering, the developer delivers a program that may not fully satisfy the specification. Extensive testing and debugging may shrink the gap between the two, but there is no assurance that the program accurately follows the specification. Such inaccuracy may not always be significant, but when a developer links a large number of such modules together, these “noises” may multiply, leading to a system that nobody can understand and manage. System software built this way often contains hard-to-find “zero-day vulnerabilities” that become easy targets for Stuxnet-like attacks. CPP aims to promote the development of new languages and tools for building certified programs and for making programming precise.

Certified software consists of an executable program plus a formal proof that the software is free of bugs with respect to a particular dependability claim. With certified software, the dependability of a software system is measured by the actual formal claim that it is able to certify. Because the claim comes with a mechanized proof, the dependability can be checked independently and automatically in an extremely reliable way. The formal dependability claim can range from making almost no guarantee, to simple type safety property, or all the way to deep liveness, security, and correctness properties. It provides a great metric for comparing different techniques and making steady progress in constructing dependable software.

The conventional wisdom is that certified software will never be practical because any real software must also rely on the underlying runtime system which is too low-level and complex to be verifiable. In recent years, however, there have been many advances in the theory and engineering of mechanized proof systems applied to verification of low-level code, including proof-carrying code, certified assembly programming, local reasoning and separation logic, certified linking of heterogeneous components, certified protocols, certified garbage collectors, certified or certifying compilation, and certified OS-kernels. CPP intends to be a driving force that would facilitate the rapid development of this exciting new area, and be a natural international forum for such work.

The recent development in several areas of modern mathematics requires mathematical proofs containing enormous computation that cannot be verified by mathematicians in an entire lifetime. Such development has puzzled the mathematical community and prompted some of our colleagues in mathematics and computer science to start developing a new paradigm, formal mathematics, which requires proofs to be verified by a reliable theorem prover. As particular examples, such an effort has been made for the four-color theorem and has started for the sphere packing problem and the classification of finite groups. We believe that this emerging paradigm is the beginning of a new era. No essential existing theorem in computer science has yet been considered worth a similar effort, but it could well happen in the very near future. For example, existing results in security would often benefit from a formal development allowing us to exhibit the essential hypotheses under which the result really holds. CPP would again be a natural international forum for this kind of work, either in mathematics or in computer science, and would participate strongly in the emergence of this paradigm.

On the other hand, there is a recent trend in computer science to formally prove new results in highly technical subjects such as computational logic, at least in part. In whichever scientific area, formal proofs have three major advantages: no assumption can be missing, as is sometimes the case; the result cannot be disputed by a wrong counterexample, as sometimes happens; and more importantly, a formal development often results in a better understanding of the proof or program, and hence results in easier and better implementation. This new trend is becoming strong in computer science work, but is not recognized yet as it should be by traditional conferences. CPP would be a natural forum promoting this trend.

There are not many proof assistants around. There should be more, because progress benefits from competition. On the other hand, there is much theoretical work that could be implemented in the form of a proof assistant, but this does not really happen. One reason is that it is hard to publish a development work, especially when this requires a long-term effort as is the case for a proof assistant. It is even harder to publish work about libraries which, we all know, are fundamental for the success of a proof assistant. CPP would pay particular attention in publishing, publicizing, and promoting this kind of work.

Finally, CPP also aims to be a publication arena for innovative teaching experiences, in computer science or mathematics, using proof assistants in an essential way. These experiences could be submitted in an innovative format to be defined.

Questions? Use the CPP contact form.