Trustworthy Systems

Formalising device protocols for sDDF driver verification

Authors

Liam Murphy

    School of Computer Science and Engineering
    UNSW,
    Sydney 2052, Australia

Published:

Talk at the 8th seL4 Summit

Abstract

Device drivers are a major source of bugs in operating systems, making them a primary target for formal verification. However, many of these bugs come from violations of the device’s protocol or faults in the device’s design, which cannot be prevented without a formal model of the device’s protocol. Such a model would traditionally be derived from the device’s datasheet, but the accuracy of this is limited, as datasheets are often incorrect and/or incomplete.

In this talk, we discuss how we leverage our open-source RISC-V SoC, Serengeti, to extract formally verified specifications from devices’ Verilog implementations, simultaneously establishing the absence of device faults. We also cover aspects of our application of these specifications to the verification of sDDF device drivers written in Pancake, with the goal of establishing end-to-end correctness.

BibTeX Entry

  @misc{Murphy_26:sel4s,
    author           = {Liam Murphy},
    howpublished     = {Talk at the 8th {seL4} {Summit}},
    location         = {Vancouver, BC, CA},
    month            = sep,
    slides           = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/papers/Murphy_26:sel4s.pdf},
    title            = {Formalising device protocols for {sDDF} driver verification},
    url              = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/papers/Murphy_26:sel4s.abstract.pml},
    video            = {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BseyKnmVRlk},
    year             = {2026}
  }

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