Abstract. The Verisoft project aims at the pervasive formal verification from the application layer over the system level software, comprising a microkernel and a compiler, down to the hardware. The different layers of the system give rise to various abstraction levels to conduct the reasoning steps efficiently. The lower the abstraction level the more details and invariants are necessary to ensure overall system correctness. Illustrated by a page-fault handler we discuss the layers and the trade-off between efficiency of reasoning at a more abstract layer versus the development of meta-theory to transfer the verification results between the layers.
We report on applying techniques for static information flow analysis to identify privacy leaks in Android applications. We have crafted a framework which checks with the help of a security type system whether the Dalvik bytecode implementation of an Android app conforms to a given privacy policy. We have carefully analyzed the Android API for possible sources and sinks of private data and identified exemplary privacy policies based on this. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework on two case studies showing detection of privacy leaks.
Abstract. Memory virtualization by means of demand paging is a crucial component of every modern operating system. The formal verification is challenging since reasoning about the page fault handler has to cover two concurrent computational sources: the processor and the hard disk. We accurately model the interleaved executions of devices and the page fault handler, which is written in a high-level programming language with inline assembler portions. We describe how to combine results from sequential Hoare logic style reasoning about the page fault handler on the low-level concurrent machine model. To the best of our knowledge this is the first example of pervasive formal verification of software communicating with devices.
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