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  4. Lightweight Hypervisor Verification: Putting the Hardware Burger on a Diet
 
conference paper

Lightweight Hypervisor Verification: Putting the Hardware Burger on a Diet

Castes, Charly  
•
Costa, François
•
Foster, Nate
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June 6, 2025
HotOS '25: Proceedings of the 2025 Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
The ACM SIGOPS 20th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems

Hypervisors are an essential part of our computing infrastructure, yet ensuring their correctness remains a significant challenge for the community. While several hypervisors have been formally verified using traditional methods, they have typically required a huge effort and significant input from verification experts. With the increasing diversity of hypervisors, driven by open hardware and custom ISAs, there is a growing need for more accessible approaches that can be used by non-experts. This paper advocates for the use of lightweight formal methods for verifying hypervisors. We conduct a top-down analysis of hypervisors and simple correctness criteria on the lock-step execution of the virtual and host machines. By relating the two executions, these criteria transform the task of verifying higher-level properties, such as memory isolation, into simpler conditions that can often be discharged automatically. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by developing a verification framework for a RISC-V hypervisor, leveraging the Kani Rust model checker and a Sail specification of the RISC-V architecture. Using our tool, we identified and corrected 21 bugs and proved several properties, including memory isolation, with minimal human effort.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3713082.3730373
Author(s)
Castes, Charly  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Costa, François
Foster, Nate
Bourgeat, Thomas  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Bugnion, Edouard  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-06-06

Publisher

ACM

Publisher place

New York, NY, USA

Published in
HotOS '25: Proceedings of the 2025 Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems
ISBN of the book

979-8-4007-1475-7

Start page

27

End page

33

Subjects

• Security and privacy → Trusted computing

•

Virtualization and security

•

Logic and verification

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCSL  
VCA  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
The ACM SIGOPS 20th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems

HOTOS '25

Banff, Canada

2025-05-14 - 2025-05-16

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

Office of Naval Research

N68335-22-C-0411

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

W912CG-23-C-0032

Available on Infoscience
June 11, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/251256
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