On the verification of system-level information flow properties for virtualized execution platforms

The security of embedded systems can be dramatically improved through the use of formally verified isolation mechanisms such as separation kernels, hypervisors, or microkernels. For trustworthiness, particularly for system-level behavior, the verifications need precise models of the underlying hardware. Such models are hard to attain, highly complex, and proofs of their security properties may not easily apply to similar but different platforms. This may render verification economically infeasible. To address these issues, we propose a compositional top-down approach to embedded system specification and verification, where the system-on-chip ismodeled as a network of distributed automata communicating via paired synchronous message passing. Using abstract specifications for each component allows to delay the development of detailed models for cores, devices, etc., while still being able to verify high-level security properties like integrity and confidentiality, and soundly refine the result for different instantiations of the abstract components at a later stage. As a case study, we apply this methodology to the verification of information flow security for an industry-scale security-oriented hypervisor on the ARMv8-A platform and report on the complete verification of guest mode security properties in the HOL4 theorem prover.