A survey on formal specification and verification of separation kernels
Yongwang ZHAO1(), Zhibin YANG1,2,3, Dianfu MA1
1. State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment (NLSDE), School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang Univerisity, Beijing 100191, China 2. College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China 3. Collaborative Innovation Center of Novel Software Technology and Industrialization, Nanjing 210016, China
Separation kernels are fundamental software of safety and security-critical systems, which provide their hosted applications with spatial and temporal separation as well as controlled information flows among partitions. The application of separation kernels in critical domain demands the correctness of the kernel by formal verification. To the best of our knowledge, there is no survey paper on this topic. This paper presents an overview of formal specification and verification of separation kernels. We first present the background including the concept of separation kernel and the comparisons among different kernels. Then, we survey the state of the art on this topic since 2000. Finally, we summarize research work by detailed comparison and discussion.
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