Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given recent high-profile successes in formal verification of security-related properties (e.g., for seL4), and the rising popularity of applying formal methods to cryptographic libraries and security protocols like TLS, we revisit the meaning of security-related proofs about software. We re-examine old issues, and identify new questions that have escaped scrutiny in the formal methods literature. We consider what value proofs about software systems deliver to end-users (e.g., in terms of net assurance benefits), and at what cost in terms of side effects (such as changes made to software to facilitate the proofs, and assumption-related deployment restrictions imposed on software if these proofs are to remain valid in operation). We consider in detail, for the first time to our knowledge, possible relationships between proofs and side effects. To make our discussion concrete, we draw on tangible examples, experience, and the literature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.024 | 0.096 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".