How to Stop Software Disasters Before They Start: Purdue PhD Paschal Amusuo on Formal Verification, Unit Proofing & Zero Trust

In this episode of Engineering Innovations from Purdue ECE, host Kristin Malavenda interviews fifth-year PhD candidate Paschal Amusuo, a Qualcomm Innovation Fellow researching software security with formal verification and runtime defenses. Amusuo shares his path from Port Harcourt, Nigeria, to Purdue and explains how memory-safety bugs—like those behind major outages such as the 2024 CrowdStrike incident—can crash systems or enable attackers to steal or alter data. He describes how formal verification differs from testing by mathematically checking whether any input can cause failure, and how his “unit proofing” approach makes these techniques more accessible to software engineers. He also discusses zer ...