Trustworthy Systems

High-fidelity specification of real-world devices

Authors

Liam Murphy, Albert Rizaldi, Lesley Rossouw, Chen George, James Treloar, Hammond Pearce, Miki Tanaka and Gernot Heiser

UNSW Sydney
Australia\ PlanV GmbH\ University of Wisconsin - Madison
U.S.A.

Abstract

Device driver bugs are the leading cause of operating-system exploits, and the lack of accurate specifications of device in- terfaces is a leading cause of driver bugs. We propose to address the specification issue by deriving formal specifi- cations of devices from their Verilog implementation, and prove the correctness of the specification against the imple- mentation. We demonstrate this approach by applying it to an open-source I2C controller. These specifications should enable synthesis or verification of drivers in the future.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Murphy_RRGTPTH_25,
    author           = {Liam Murphy and Albert Rizaldi and Lesley Rossouw and Chen George and James Treloar and Hammond
                        Pearce and Miki Tanaka and Gernot Heiser},
    booktitle        = {Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS)},
    doi              = {10.1145/3764860.3768335},
    location         = {Seoul, Republic of Korea},
    month            = oct,
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/papers/Murphy_RRGTPTH_25.pdf},
    title            = {High-Fidelity Specification of Real-World Devices},
    year             = {2025}
  }

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