Heidi Howard

Reasoning about Distributed Protocols with Smart Casual Verification Here at decentralized thoughts, we spend a lot of time reasoning about distributed protocols. Often, we focus on solving distributed consensus, personally it’s my favorite CS problem, but it’s also fa...

It's wonderful to be writing again at Decentralized Thoughts! This time focusing on how we can tie together the messy reality of real-world distributed system to the elegant formal models we often use instead for reasoning about correctness. decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2025-05-23-s...

Also thanks to Andrew Helwer for shouting us out in the TLA+ Monthly Development Update foundation.tlapl.us/blog/2025-05...

It's smart casual verification (like the dress code) instead of causal verification but still it's fab to see our recent NSDI paper featured in the @msftresearch.bsky.social Research Focus.

🔧 GenAI-Accelerated #TLAplus Challenge is live!
Use GenAI to enhance TLA⁺ specs, tools, or workflows.
Submit your project for a chance to win a prize.
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Smart Casual Verification of the Confidential Consortium Framework The Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF) is an open-source platform for developing trustworthy and reliable cloud applications. CCF powers Microsoft's Azure Confidential Ledger service and as such ...

Of course arxiv.org/abs/2406.17455

A quick history lesson in the sunshine before NSDI. Exciting to speaking about our paper on “smart casual verification” with TLA+ and how we applied it to find subtle bugs in our distributed system, the Confidential Consortium Framework.

A big thank you to @muratdemirbas.bsky.social for covering our upcoming NSDI paper on his blog. The paper documents our adventures with “smart casual verification”, combining formal specification and model checking with validation of real execution traces from the Confidential Consortium Framework

BFT as a poem (thanks to AI):

In webs of nodes where chaos plays, Byzantine whispers cloud the ways.
Yet trust persists, through trials deep, Consensus wakes where doubts would creep.
Resilient minds, a truth refined,
Order from discord, tightly aligned.

Interesting workshop and a lovely community, would very much recommend!

Cambridge Residency Programme – Post Doc Researcher Security and Privacy in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom | Research, Applied, & Data Sciences at Microsoft Apply for Cambridge Residency Programme – Post Doc Researcher Security and Privacy in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom | Research, Applied, & Data Sciences at Microsoft

We’re looking for two postdocs to join us at Azure Research. Please help to get the word out to final year phd students and early careers researchers in the areas of security & privacy, formal verification, systems, architecture and/or cryptography