Presenter: Neha Rungta

Abstract: AWS users rely on fine-grained policies to control access to their data and resources. The AWS authorization engine evaluates these policies trillions of times daily, making it a cornerstone of security, availability, and correctness. To enhance these guarantees, we replaced this critical engine with a formally verified one. This transition required seamless user experience, extensive testing over months, and quadrillions of evaluations to validate correctness. In this talk, I’ll share insights from this journey and the impact of deploying the new engine.

Bio: Neha Rungta is a Director of Science in AWS. Neha is a world-renowned expert in developing and applying automated reasoning techniques to industrial systems. Neha’s work in AWS has broken new ground in the scale of automated reasoning applications. She has launched security services such as Amazon S3 Block Public Access, IAM Access Analyzer, and now, the Cedar language and Amazon Verified Permissions. Before AWS, Neha was a Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center where she verified the correctness of unmanned space systems and conflict detection algorithms used in commercial aircraft.

Hosted by: Professor Daniel Fremont