From C to Interaction Trees Specifying, Verifying, and Testing a Networked Server

We present the first formal verification of a networked server implemented in C. Interaction trees, a general structure for representing reactive computations, are used to tie together disparate verification and testing tools (Coq, VST, and Quick-Chick) and to axiomatize the behavior of the operating system on which the server runs (CertiKOS). The main theorem connects a specification of acceptable server behaviors, written in a straightforward "one client at a time" style, with the CompCert semantics of the C program. The variability introduced by low-level buffering of messages and interleaving of multiple TCP connections is captured using network refinement, a variant of observational refinement.