George Pîrlea

Bio / Curriculum vitae

I am a Computer Science graduate from UCL, currently working as a researcher in the blockchain space.

My interests include formal methods, programming languages, distributed systems, and cryptography.

Get in touch via email: george@pirlea.net

Follow me on Twitter: @GeorgePirlea

Follow on Google Scholar: George Pîrlea

Publications

1. George Pîrlea and Ilya Sergey. Mechanising Blockchain Consensus. In 7th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP 2018). Los Angeles, CA,USA, January 2018. ACM.

Theses

1. Toychain: Formally Verified Blockchain Consensus.
   MEng Thesis. Advised by Earl Barr and Ilya Sergey.
   

   Abstract: We present Toychain, the first proven-correct implementation of a Nakamoto-style blockchain consensus protocol. We improve our original model by removing several overly-strong assumptions, notably the assumption that hashing is injective. Then, we instantiate the model with a SHA256-based proof-of-work scheme and extract our proven-correct OCaml implementation of Nakamoto consensus. Finally, we execute our implementation on a local area network to test its effectiveness.

Selected Talks

• A Formal Model of Rust's Pinning.
  Given at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (September 2019).
• Formally Verified Blockchain Consensus.
  Given at National University of Singapore (March 2019), Zilliqa Research (March 2019), and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (June 2019).
• Formally Verifying Coco.
  Given at Microsoft Research Cambridge (August 2018).
• Mechanising Blockchain Consensus.
  Given at CPP (January 2018) and Microsoft Research Cambridge (June 2018).