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Creators/Authors contains: "Balzer, Stephanie"

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  1. Many of today’s message-passing systems not only require messages to be exchanged in a certain order but also to happen at a certaintimeor within a certaintime window. Such correctness conditions are particularly prominent in Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time systems applications, which interface with hardware devices that come with inherent timing constraints. Verifying compliance of such systems with the intendedtimed protocolis challenged by theirheterogeneity—ruling out any verification method that relies on the system to be implemented in one common language, let alone in a high-level and typed programming language. To address this challenge, this paper contributes alogical relationto verify that its inhabitants (the applications and hardware devices to be proved correct) comply with the given timed protocol. To cater to the systems’ heterogeneity, the logical relation is entirelysemantic, lifting the requirement that its inhabitants are syntactically well-typed. A semantic approach enables two modes of use of the logical relation for program verification:(i)once-and-for-allverification of anarbitrarywell-typed application, given a type system, and(ii)per-instanceverification of a specific application / hardware device (foreign code). To facilitate mode(i), the paper develops a refinement type system for expressing timed message-passing protocols and proves that any well-typed program inhabits the logical relation (fundamental theorem). A type checker for the refinement type system has been implemented in Rust, using an SMT solver to check satisfiability of timing constraints. Then, the paper demonstrates both modes of use based on a small case study of a smart home system for monitoring air quality, consisting of a controller application and various environment sensors. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available January 7, 2026
  2. null (Ed.)
    Programming digital contracts comes with unique challenges, which include (i) expressing and enforcing protocols of interaction, (ii) controlling resource usage, and (iii) preventing the duplication or deletion of a contract's assets. This article presents the design and type-theoretic foundation of Nomos, a programming language for digital contracts that addresses these challenges. To express and enforce protocols, Nomos is based on shared binary session types. To control resource usage, Nomos employs automatic amortized resource analysis. To prevent the duplication or deletion of assets, Nomos uses a linear type system. A monad integrates the effectful session-typed language with a general-purpose functional language. Nomos' prototype implementation features linear-time type checking and efficient type reconstruction that includes automatic inference of resource bounds via off-the-shelf linear optimization. The effectiveness of the language is evaluated with case studies on implementing common smart contracts such as auctions, elections, and currencies. Nomos is completely formalized, including the type system, a cost semantics, and a transactional semantics to deploy Nomos contracts on a blockchain. The type soundness proof ensures that protocols are followed at run-time and that types establish sound upper bounds on the resource consumption, ruling out re-entrancy and out-of-gas vulnerabilities. 
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  3. Shared session types generalize the Curry-Howard correspondence between intuitionistic linear logic and the session-typed pi-calculus with adjoint modalities that mediate between linear and shared session types, giving rise to a programming model where shared channels must be used according to a locking discipline of acquire-release. While this generalization greatly increases the range of programs that can be written, the gain in expressiveness comes at the cost of deadlock-freedom, a property which holds for many linear session type systems. In this paper, we develop a type system for logically-shared sessions in which types capture not only the interactive behavior of processes but also constrain the order of resources (i.e., shared processes) they may acquire. This type-level information is then used to rule out cyclic dependencies among acquires and synchronization points, resulting in a system that ensures deadlock-free communication for well-typed processes in the presence of shared sessions, higher-order channel passing, and recursive processes. We illustrate our approach on a series of examples, showing that it rules out deadlocks in circular networks of both shared and linear recursive processes, while still being permissive enough to type concurrent implementations of shared imperative data structures as processes. 
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  4. In the simply-typed lambda-calculus we can recover the full range of expressiveness of the untyped lambda-calculus solely by adding a single recursive type U = U -> U. In contrast, in the session-typed pi-calculus, recursion alone is insufficient to recover the untyped pi-calculus, primarily due to linearity: each channel just has two unique endpoints. In this paper, we show that shared channels with a corresponding sharing semantics (based on the language SILL_S developed in prior work) are enough to embed the untyped asynchronous pi-calculus via a universal shared session type U_S. We show that our encoding of the asynchronous pi-calculus satisfies operational correspondence and preserves observable actions (i.e., processes are weakly bisimilar to their encoding). Moreover, we clarify the expressiveness of SILL_S by developing an operationally correct encoding of SILL_S in the asynchronous pi-calculus. 
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