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About

About

I am currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics at Universidade do Minho and researcher at HASLab/INESC TEC. I obtained my PhD degree in Computer Science from this university in 2003. My research interests lie in Cryptography  and Information Security and its intersection with Program Verification. 

I have been working on the development of high-assurance cryptographic implementations for the last 10 years, aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical security and real-world security. I am particularly interested in provable security and its interplay with the formal verification of cryptographic proofs and cryptographic software implementations. 

Interest
Topics
Details

Details

  • Name

    José Bacelar Almeida
  • Cluster

    Computer Science
  • Role

    Senior Researcher
  • Since

    01st November 2011
003
Publications

2022

A formal treatment of the role of verified compilers in secure computation

Authors
Almeida, JCB; Barbosa, M; Barthe, G; Pacheco, H; Pereira, V; Portela, B;

Publication
JOURNAL OF LOGICAL AND ALGEBRAIC METHODS IN PROGRAMMING

Abstract
Secure multiparty computation (SMC) allows for complex computations over encrypted data. Privacy concerns for cloud applications makes this a highly desired technology and recent performance improvements show that it is practical. To make SMC accessible to non-experts and empower its use in varied applications, many domain-specific compilers are being proposed. We review the role of these compilers and provide a formal treatment of the core steps that they perform to bridge the abstraction gap between high-level ideal specifications and efficient SMC protocols. Our abstract framework bridges this secure compilation problem across two dimensions: 1) language-based source- to target-level semantic and efficiency gaps, and 2) cryptographic ideal- to real-world security gaps. We link the former to the setting of certified compilation, paving the way to leverage long-run efforts such as CompCert in future SMC compilers. Security is framed in the standard cryptographic sense. Our results are supported by a machine-checked formalisation carried out in EasyCrypt. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

2022

Verified Password Generation from Password Composition Policies

Authors
Grilo, M; Campos, J; Ferreira, JF; Almeida, JB; Mendes, A;

Publication
INTEGRATED FORMAL METHODS, IFM 2022

Abstract

2021

Machine-checked ZKP for NP relations: Formally Verified Security Proofs and Implementations of MPC-in-the-Head

Authors
Almeida, JB; Barbosa, M; Correia, ML; Eldefrawy, K; Graham-Lengrand, S; Pacheco, H; Pereira, V;

Publication
CCS '21: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2021 ACM SIGSAC CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER AND COMMUNICATIONS SECURITY

Abstract
MPC-in-the-Head (MitH) is a general framework that enables constructing efficient zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols for NP relations from secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols. In this paper we present the first machine-checked implementations of MitH. We begin with an EasyCrypt formalization that preserves the modular structure of the original construction and can be instantiated with arbitrary MPC protocols, and secret sharing and commitment schemes satisfying standard notions of security. We then formalize various suitable components, which we use to obtain full-fledged ZK protocols for general relations. We compare two approaches for obtaining verified executable implementations. The first uses a fully automated extraction from EasyCrypt to OCaml. The second reduces the trusted computing base (TCB) and provides better performance by combining code extraction with formally verified manual low-level components implemented in the Jasmin language. We conclude with a discussion of the trade-off between the formal verification effort and the performance of resulting executables, and how our approach opens the way for fully verified implementations of state-of the-art optimized protocols based on MitH. © 2021 ACM.

2020

The Last Mile: High-Assurance and High-Speed Cryptographic Implementations

Authors
Almeida, JB; Barbosa, M; Barthe, G; Gregoire, B; Koutsos, A; Laporte, V; Oliveira, T; Strub, PY;

Publication
2020 IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON SECURITY AND PRIVACY (SP 2020)

Abstract
We develop a new approach for building cryptographic implementations. Our approach goes the last mile and delivers assembly code that is provably functionally correct, protected against side-channels, and as efficient as hand-written assembly. We illustrate our approach using ChaCha20-Poly1305, one of the two ciphersuites recommended in TLS 1.3, and deliver formally verified vectorized implementations which outperform the fastest non-verified code.We realize our approach by combining the Jasmin framework, which offers in a single language features of high-level and low-level programming, and the EasyCrypt proof assistant, which offers a versatile verification infrastructure that supports proofs of functional correctness and equivalence checking. Neither of these tools had been used for functional correctness before. Taken together, these infrastructures empower programmers to develop efficient and verified implementations by "game hopping", starting from reference implementations that are proved functionally correct against a specification, and gradually introducing program optimizations that are proved correct by equivalence checking.We also make several contributions of independent interest, including a new and extensible verified compiler for Jasmin, with a richer memory model and support for vectorized instructions, and a new embedding of Jasmin in EasyCrypt. © 2020 IEEE.

2020

Certified Compilation for Cryptography: Extended x86 Instructions and Constant-Time Verification

Authors
Almeida, JB; Barbosa, M; Barthe, G; Laporte, V; Oliveira, T;

Publication
Progress in Cryptology - INDOCRYPT 2020 - 21st International Conference on Cryptology in India, Bangalore, India, December 13-16, 2020, Proceedings

Abstract

Supervised
thesis

2022

Estratégia de Cibersegurança

Author
Nelson Correia Faria

Institution
UM

2022

Extending Conflict Free Replicated Data Types Fault Models

Author
Houssam Ahmad Yactine

Institution
UM

2022

Icarus - A Cloud Security Perspective

Author
João Aloísio Sousa Araújo

Institution
UM

2022

Implementação e verificação de código criptográfico com segurança pós-quântica

Author
Henrique José Carvalho Faria

Institution
UM

2022

Implementação Certificada da Componente Criptográfica do Gestor de Passwords KeePass

Author
Pedro Miguel Marques Freitas

Institution
UM