Marino Miculan

(Ph.: G.T.Bernardi)

Associate Professor of Computer Science and Deputy Head at Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics of the University of Udine. (Qualified to Full Professor since March 2018.)

This webpage collects some information about my research, including my publications, the scientific projects and events I am involved in, my teaching activities and academic services.

I know one or two things about process calculi, distributed ledgers, session types, category theory and logic, bigraphs, coalgebras, structured operational semantics, nominal sets, systems biology, type theory, logical frameworks, proof assistants. (In a sense, I am a horizontal researcher.)

Currently, I am mostly interested in security issues of distributed, component-based and smart systems, whose overall behavior is determined by the interaction of many heterogeneous entities. To this end, I am applying formal methods (possibly with a pinch of Machine Learning) to define new models, languages, methodologies and techniques for the formalisation, verification and certification of security properties of these systems.
If this sounds interesting to you too, drop me a note.

I founded and currently lead the Models and Applications of Distributed Systems laboratory, the Udine node of the CINI National CyberSecurity laboratory, and the MadrHacks, the ethical hacking team of the University of Udine.
I have the fortune to work with great people.

latest news (more)

Sep 21, 2023	Joint Meeting of CINI, in Naples
Sep 13, 2023	Attending ICTCS 2023 in Palermo
Aug 11, 2023	I am honored to serve as President of the Selection Committee for the Scientific Class of Scuola Superiore, the excellence school of the University of Udine.
Aug 4, 2023	Two 3-years positions at University of Venice, funded by PNRR "SERICS" (deadline: Aug 24, 2023)
Jul 21, 2023	I am honored to serve from today as Deputy Head of the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics.

selected publications (more)

Automated Verification of Telegram’s MTProto 2.0 in the Symbolic Model

Marino Miculan, and Nicola Vitacolonna

Computers & Security 2023

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MTProto 2.0 is the suite of security protocols for instant messaging at the core of the popular Telegram messenger application. In this paper we analyse MTProto 2.0 using ProVerif, a state-of-the-art symbolic security protocol verifier based on the Dolev-Yao model. We provide the first formal symbolic model of MTProto 2.0; in this model, we provide fully automated proofs of the soundness of authentication, normal chat, end-to-end encrypted chat, and rekeying mechanisms with respect to several security properties, including authentication, integrity, secrecy and perfect forward secrecy. At the same time, we discover that the rekeying protocol is vulnerable to an unknown key-share (UKS) attack. To achieve these results, we proceed in an incremental way: each protocol is examined in isolation, relying only on the guarantees provided by the previous ones and the robustness of the basic cryptographic primitives. The importance of this research is threefold. First, it proves the formal correctness of MTProto 2.0 with respect to most relevant security properties. Secondly, we isolate the aspects of cryptographic primitives that escape the symbolic model and thus require further investigation in the computational model. Finally, our modelisation can serve as a reference for the implementation and analysis of clients and servers.
Composable partial multiparty session types for open systems

Claude Stolze, Marino Miculan, and Pietro Di Gianantonio

Software and Systems Modeling 2023

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The AbU Language: IoT Distributed Programming Made Easy

Michele Pasqua, Massimo Comuzzo, and Marino Miculan

IEEE Access 2022

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Computing (optimal) embeddings of directed bigraphs

Alessio Chiapperini, Marino Miculan, and Marco Peressotti

Sci. Comput. Program. 2022

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