First, Albert Kwon provides an overview of recent systems for secure and private communication. While messaging protocols such as Signal provide privacy guarantees, Albert's selected research papers illustrate what is possible at the cutting edge: more transparent endpoint authentication, better protection of communication metadata, and anonymous broadcasting. These papers marry state-of-the-art cryptography with practical, privacy-preserving protocols, providing a glimpse of what we might expect from tomorrow's secure messaging systems.
Second, James Wilcox takes us on a tour of recent advances in verified systems design. It's now possible to build end-to-end verified compilers, operating systems, and distributed systems that are provably correct with respect to well-defined specifications, providing high assurance of well-defined, well-behaved code. Because these system components interact with low-level hardware like the instruction set architecture and external networks, each paper introduces new techniques to balance the tension between formal correctness and practical applicability. As programming language techniques advance and more of the modern computing stack continues to crystallize, expect these advances to make their way into production systems.
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