vTRUST: A formal modeling and verification framework for virtualization systems

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.