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A Survey on Formal Verification of Separation Kernels
  • Ram Chandra Bhushan,
  • Dharmendra K. Yadav
Ram Chandra Bhushan
Research Scholar, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad, India

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

Author Profile
Dharmendra K. Yadav
Professor, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad, India

Abstract

In developing safety and security critical systems, separation kernel acts as a primary foundation, which provides spatial as well as temporal separation. Separation kernel offers highly-assured partitions to the applications hosted on the fundamentally critical systems and can also control the flow of information between them. The industries, as well as academia, have developed several separation kernels that have been broadly applied in critical systems like military/defense secured applications, avionics/aerospace intelligent systems, healthcare units that deal with human lives and in many more areas. The increasing popularity of separation kernels demands the formal verification that assures the correctness of the functionalities in it. Further, formal verification of separation kernels has become mandatory by the security/safety certification authorities. This paper first presents the concept of separation kernel, and then it discusses the functionalities, design, and properties of it. The classification and analysis of the formal languages are being presented in this paper that has been used for writing the specifications of separation kernel and verifying it. The paper is an attempt towards the classification of formal languages being used for the verification of several separation kernels.