A Case Study on Verification of a Cloud Hypervisor by Proof and Structural Testing

Abstract

Abstract. Complete formal verification of software remains extremely expensive and often reserved in practice for the most critical products. Test generation techniques are much less costly and can be used in combination with theorem proving tools to provide high confidence in the software correctness at an acceptable cost when an automatic prover does not succeed alone. This short paper presents a case study on verification of a cloud hypervisor with the Frama-C toolset, in which deductive verification has been advantageously combined with structural all-path testing. We describe our combined verification approach, present the adopted methodology and emphasize its benefits and limitations.

A Case Study on Formal Verification of the Anaxagoros Hypervisor Paging System with Frama-C

“…The only previous work [23] on verification of Anaxagoros presented partial formal verification, completed by test generation for unproven functions, did not consider parallel execution and did not use interactive proof.…”