Trustworthy Systems

The formally verified seL4 mocrokernel: Present and future

Authors

Gernot Heiser

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

Published:

Invited Talk at Multicore World

Abstract

seL4 is the world's first operating system (OS) kernel with a formal, machine-checked proof of implementation correctness, originally on Arm v6 processors. Since that initial work ten years ago, we have added proofs of security enforcement and timeliness properties and extended verification to x86 and RISC-V architectures. To this date, seL4 is not only the most comprehensively verified OS, but has a strong performance focus and evolves (with proofs) to address a widening class of real-world use cases.

This talk will provide a brief overview of the present state of seL4 and its verification story, including multicore support. I'll focus on recent enhancements, in particular advanced mechanisms for supporting mixed-criticality real-time systems. I will also cover on-going work on time protection, a fundamental approach for preventing information leakage through timing channels.

BibTeX Entry

  @misc{Heiser_20:mcw,
    author           = {Gernot Heiser},
    howpublished     = {Invited Talk at {Multicore World}},
    location         = {Wellington, NZ},
    month            = feb,
    title            = {The Formally Verified {seL4} Mocrokernel: Present and Future},
    year             = {2020}
  }

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