Valentin Wüstholz
@vwuestholz.bsky.social
Principal Researcher and Co-founder at Diligence Security, previously at Consensys, ETH Zürich, UT Austin, Microsoft Research, and Google
PSA: With the hype around (agentic) formal verification, we should be much more explicit about what aspects of a system were "formally verified". Ask "what specs were verified?", "who reviewed them?", and "how was the verifier validated?" 🙏"formally verified" != "bug free"!
Vibe Verification (n.): Letting an AI agent produce programs, specs, and proofs with minimal human supervision; also the smug feeling when the agent successfully made a formal verification tool emit a green checkmark. Soon coming to nuclear power plants near you? 🙈
Hackers in 2025: "Find all the bugs! Make no mistakes!" 🔍 Hackers in 2026: "Fix all the bugs! Make no mistakes!" 🔧 What breakthrough will 2027 bring? 🤯
Some people are way too excited about AI agents doing formal verification! 😅 Why would agents go through the trouble of finding and proving meaningful specifications when they could just cheat by assuming false, exploiting a soundness bug, or proving a complex tautology?
🎉 Excited to share that our paper "ARGUZZ: Testing zkVMs for Soundness and Completeness Bugs" was accepted to USENIX Security 2026. Joint work with @vwuestholz.bsky.social and Maria Christakis 📑 Paper: mariachris.github.io/Pubs/SECURIT... 💻 Repository: github.com/Rigorous-Sof...
Are conference reviewers harsher when they have a submission of their own? Post from @wicko3.bsky.social johnwickerson.wordpress.com/2025/11/19/a...
Are conference reviewers harsher when they have a submission of their own?
My area of academia runs mainly on conferences, as opposed to journals. This means that a few times each year, hundreds of researchers simultaneously submit papers about their latest and greatest p…
johnwickerson.wordpress.com
📣 Fuzzing community: Stop obsessing over incremental metrics and objectives. We're stuck in a local optimum! True progress requires a focus on novelty and paradigm shifts to advance the state of the art. Let's innovate, not just optimize.
dmnk@dmnk.bsky.social · 11mo agoMust-read for fuzzing folks (read: tooling/algorithms/academia) by Addison Crump addisoncrump.info/research/wha...
Presented our #CCS25 paper yesterday in Taipei! 🎤 We introduce Circuzz, the first systematic fuzzing framework for zero-knowledge (ZK) pipelines. 📄 Paper: mariachris.github.io/Pubs/CCS-202... 💻 Repo: github.com/Rigorous-Sof... with @isychev.bsky.social, @vwuestholz.bsky.social, Maria Christakis
We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...
signal.org
The future of software engineering: "My program doesn't have bugs! 😡These are just some bad vibes!" 😎
Our department in lovely Freiburg has an opening for a Full Professorship (W3) on Software Engineering (succession of Andreas Podelski) with a more technical and formal focus uni-freiburg.de/en/job/00004...
University of FreiburgText icon 'Universität Freiburg'Seal element of the university of freiburg in the shape of a flowerSearch iconMenu iconText icon 'Universität Freiburg'Search iconMenu iconhomehom...
uni-freiburg.de
#FUZZING'25 Deadline Extension ────── If you have not finished your #FUZZING paper yet, you are in luck! :) We decided to extend the deadline to March 26, 2025! 🔗 fuzzingworkshop.github.io //cc @rohan.padhye.org, László Szekeres, @ruijiemeng.bsky.social, @mboehme.bsky.social
FUZZING'25 Workshop @ ISSTA
The 4th International Fuzzing Workshop (FUZZING) 2025 welcomes all researchers, scientists, engineers and practitioners to present their latest research findings, empirical analyses, t...
fuzzingworkshop.github.io
Want security in research? And research in security? Actually, why not have both? "In view of the current geopolitical landscape", #CISPA has opened a new round of faculty positions, including CySec, SE, ML, theory: jobs.cispa.saarland/jobs/detail/...
Tenure-Track Faculty in all areas related to Information Security and Artificial Intelligence (f/m/d) - extended call | CISPA | Jobs
jobs.cispa.saarland
📣 I have open PhD and postdoc positions in "Practically Usable Verification for Numerical Programs", located in Uppsala, Sweden. Deadline to apply: 22 April. Start date is flexible. Find the links to ad and application portals on my website: malyzajko.github.io
