Proof Engineering Considered Essential

In this talk, I will give an overview of the various formal verification projects around the evolving seL4 microkernel, and discuss our experience in large-scale proof engineering and maintenance. In particular, the presentation will draw a picture of what these verifications mean and how they fit together into a whole. Among these are a number of firsts: the first code-level functional correctness proof of a general-purpose OS kernel, the first non-interference proof for such a kernel at the code-level, the first binary-level functional verification of systems code of this complexity, and the first sound worst-case execution-time profile for a protected-mode operating system kernel. Taken together, these projects produced proof artefacts on the order of 400,000 lines of Isabelle/HOL proof scripts. This order of magnitude brings engineering aspects to proofs that we so far mostly associate with software and code. In the second part of the talk, I will report on our experience in proof engineering methods and tools, and pose a number o