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vTRUST: A Formal Modeling and Verification Framework for Virtualization Systems

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8144))

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Abstract

Virtualization is widely used for critical services like Cloud computing. It is desirable to formally verify virtualization systems. However, the complexity of the virtualization system makes the formal analysis a difficult task, e.g., sophisticated programs to manipulate low-level technologies, paged memory management, memory mapped I/O and trusted computing. In this paper, we propose a formal framework, vTRUST, to formally describe virtualization systems with a carefully designed abstraction. vTRUST includes a library to model configurable hardware components and technologies commonly used in virtualization. The system designer can thus verify virtualization systems on critical properties (e.g., confidentiality, verifiability, isolation and PCR consistency) with respect to certain adversary models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of vTRUST by automatically verifying a real-world Cloud implementation with critical bugs identified.

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Hao, J., Liu, Y., Cai, W., Bai, G., Sun, J. (2013). vTRUST: A Formal Modeling and Verification Framework for Virtualization Systems. In: Groves, L., Sun, J. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8144. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41202-8_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41202-8_22

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41201-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41202-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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