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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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