Conrad Watt

I am a Research Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. My PhD was supervised by Peter Sewell.

My current research centres around formalising the WebAssembly language.

I currently serve as an Invited Expert to the W3C WebAssembly Working Group.

I have developed various Isabelle models of the WebAssembly language, the most up-to-date of which can be found here.

Publications

• Isolation Without Taxation: Near-Zero-Cost Transitions for WebAssembly and SFI
  Matthew Kolosick, Shravan Narayan, Evan Johnson, Conrad Watt, Michael LeMay, Deepak Garg, Ranjit Jhala, Deian Stefan
  Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2022)


• Two Mechanisations of WebAssembly 1.0
  Conrad Watt, Xiaojia Rao, Jean Pichon-Pharabod, Martin Bodin, Philippa Gardner
  Formal Methods (FM 2021)


• Mechanising and Evolving the Formal Semantics of WebAssembly: the Web's new Low-level Language
  Conrad Watt
  PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2021)


• Repairing and Mechanising the JavaScript Relaxed Memory Model
  Conrad Watt, Christopher Pulte, Anton Podkopaev, Guillaume Barbier, Stephen Dolan, Shaked Flur, Jean Pichon-Pharabod, Shu-yu Guo
  Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2020)


• Weakening WebAssembly
  Conrad Watt, Andreas Rossberg, Jean Pichon-Pharabod
  Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2019)


• A Program Logic for First-Order Encapsulated WebAssembly
  Conrad Watt, Petar Maksimović, Neelakantan R. Krishnaswami, Philippa Gardner
  European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2019)


• Progressive Memory Safety for WebAssembly (position paper)
  Craig Disselkoen, John Renner, Conrad Watt, Tal Garfinkel, Amit Levy, Deian Stefan
  Hardware and Architectural Support for Security and Privacy (HASP 2019)


• CT-Wasm: Type-Driven Secure Cryptography for the Web Ecosystem
  Conrad Watt, John Renner, Natalie Popescu, Sunjay Cauligi, Deian Stefan
  Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2019)


• Mechanising and Verifying the WebAssembly Specification
  Conrad Watt
  Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP 2018)
  Editor's Pick - ACM Computing Reviews
  (supplementary files)


• A Trusted Mechanised Specification of JavaScript: One Year On (invited paper)
  Philippa Gardner, Gareth Smith, Conrad Watt, Thomas Wood
  Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2015)

Invited Talks

• WebAssembly, Formal Methods, and Secure Cryptography
  Conrad Watt, John Renner, Natalie Popescu, Sunjay Cauligi, Deian Stefan
  Microsoft Research Cambridge (2019)


• Adventures in Mechanising and Verifying WebAssembly
  Conrad Watt
  Formal Methods Meets JavaScript (2018)
  Formal Methods and Tools for Security (2017)

Misc

• Formal Methods and the WebAssembly Specification
  Conrad Watt, Andreas Rossberg, Jean Pichon-Pharabod
  South of England Regional Programming Language Seminar series (S-REPLS 11)


• Trestle: Bridging the Performance and Safety Divide in WebAssembly
  Craig Disselkoen, Tal Garfinkel, Deian Stefan, Conrad Watt
  Principles of Secure Compilation (PriSC 2019)


• WebAssembly
  Conrad Watt
  Archive of Formal Proofs (2018)