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Abstract

Title:

Experience report: seL4 — formally verifying a high-performance microkernel

Authors:

Gerwin Klein, Philip Derrin and Kevin Elphinstone

    School of Computer Science and Engineering
    University of New South Wales
    Sydney 2052 Australia
    
    National ICT Australia, Sydney, Australia

Abstract:

We report on our experience using Haskell as an executable specification language in the formal verification of the seL4 microkernel. The verification connects an abstract operational specification in the theorem prover Isabelle/HOL to a C implementation of the microkernel. We describe how this project differs from other efforts, and examine the effect of using Haskell in a large-scale formal verification. The kernel comprises 8,700 lines of C code; the verification more than 150,000 lines of proof script.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Klein_DE_09,
    publisher        = {ACM},
    author           = {Gerwin Klein and Philip Derrin and Kevin Elphinstone},
    booktitle        = {Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Functional Programming},
    title            = {Experience Report: {seL4} --- Formally Verifying a High-Performance Microkernel},
    year             = {2009},
    month            = {Aug},
    address          = {Edinburgh, UK},
    pages            = {91--96}
  }

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