KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Designing reliable and secure critical systems requires great care and precision, as errors in their development can lead to catastrophic consequences, especially in sectors such as medicine, finance, aviation, space, and defense.

For example, consider cybersecurity protocols that aim to secure communications on the Internet by relying on cryptographic primitives. These protocols are essential for various applications, including online shopping, bank transactions, electronic voting, and securing government communications and vital infrastructure. However, designing error-free cybersecurity protocols can be challenging as demonstrated by the discovery of a critical flaw 17 years after the original publication of the famous Needham-Schroeder public-key protocol. Even today, many flaws are still found in current cybersecurity protocols, resulting in financial losses and eroding user confidence. The analysis of cybersecurity protocols is very complex because the set of scenarios to consider can be infinite.

Thanks to their solid mathematical foundation, formal methods make it possible to manage endless possibilities, offering a powerful approach to validating cybersecurity protocols and, more generally, critical systems.

This talk will explore how formal methods can be used for various applications, such as cybersecurity protocols and firewall configurations. Additionally, it will investigate the main challenges that formal method techniques face in the validation process and discuss ongoing efforts to overcome these challenges.

Prof. Bouhoula is a Senior Computer Scientist specializing in Formal Methods and Cybersecurity with about thirty years of high-level academic and managerial achievements in several world-renowned institutions.

Prof. Bouhoula has served in several positions, including the CEO of the National Center of Informatics in Tunisia, the Chairman and CEO of the Research Institute for Computer Science and Telecommunication in Tunisia, the Founder and Head of the "Digital Security" Research Lab at the University of Carthage, a Senior Researcher at the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA, Nancy - France), Visiting Professor at the University of Tsukuba (Japan) for more than a decade and Visiting Researcher at SRI International (California - USA) and Mitsubishi Research Institute (Tokyo - Japan).

Prof. Bouhoula owns three patents and has published over 200 articles in leading international journals, conferences, and refereed workshops. He has made significant contributions to prestigious A* conferences such as the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Computer Aided Verification (CAV), and the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS). In addition, his research was published in numerous renowned journals, including Pattern Recognition, Computer Networks, and the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic.

Prof. Bouhoula was awarded two prestigious Tunisian decorations: the Knight of the Order of the Republic and the Knight of the National Order of Merit in Education and Science. In addition, he has been honored with the University of Carthage Award for Excellence in Scientific Research.