seL4 Summit 2025 Abstracts

Collaborators:

• Kansas State University/Aarhus University – Robby, Jason Belt, Stefan Hallerstede
• Collins Aerospace – Darren Cofer, Isaac Amundson, Junaid Babar, David Hardin
• Dornerworks – Robert VanVossen, Nathan Studer
• UNSW – Gernot Heiser, Robert Sison
• ProofCraft – Gerwin Klein, Rafal Kolanski, June Andronick

The Collins Aerospace INSPECTA project (part of the DARPA PROVERS program) aims to provide a model-based development tool chain for seL4 with integrated formal methods. The High Assurance Modeling and Rapid engineering for embedded systems (HAMR) framework, whose development is led by researchers at Kansas State University, is a key part of the INSPECTA tool chain. Developed on the DARPA CASE project within Collins Aerospace team and on other US Department of Defense projects led by Galois, HAMR originally supported system modeling using the SAE standard AADL modeling language. On these projects, HAMR generated infrastructure code and application code thread skeletons in C and in Slang (a safety-critical subset of Scala developed at Kansas State University). HAMR supported system deployments on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), Linux, and the seL4 micro-kernel using CAmkES. HAMR supported the GUMBO AADL contract language (jointly developed by KSU and Galois) that enabled engineers to formally specify interface behaviors of AADL thread components using familiar contract-based idioms. These model-level contracts were translated as part of HAMR’s code generation to code-level contracts (allowing SMT-based tools to verify that user application code conforms to contracts) and executable contracts (enabling testing frameworks to use these as test oracles and run-time monitoring to use them as run-time checks on thread input/output behavior).

In this talk, we describe a number of new capabilities of HAMR developed on the INSPECTA project. First, the modeling layer of HAMR has been extended to support SysMLv2 – a new version of the widely-used SysML modeling language standardized by the Object Modeling Group (OMG). We describe how HAMR supported AADL-based specifications and tooling, including the GUMBO contract language, are being integrated within SysMLv2 modeling environments, including the SysIDE extension for VSCode. Second, we have extended HAMR’s code generation to support the Rust programming language and seL4 microkit. This provides both C and Rust-based development on seL4 with both CAmkES and microkit. For example, Rust implementations of SysMLv2/AADL threads can be deployed in seL4 microkit protection domains, with auto-generated microkit system description files and developer-facing microkit APIs for threading and channel communication. Finally, we have added contract generation support in Rust code for both formal contracts for the Verus verification tool and Rust executable contracts. The talk will provide short demos of all of these features – including showing Verus verification of seL4-deployed Rust thread component application code conformance to HAMR-generated contracts and automated property-based testing of Rust thread component code against HAMR-generated executable contracts.

These new capabilities of HAMR are being applied by Dornerworks and Collins Aerospace engineers on military applications including mission control software for UAVs.

HAMR is available under an open-source license, and the project website includes an example repository and collection of videos, tutorials, and classroom lecture materials (also suited for workforce training).

The proportion of Arm platforms for which seL4 is verified has increased from 13% to 90% in the last year. In addition, over the same period, a new platform port has been added where seL4’s proofs hold without any involvement from proof engineers, i.e. at zero verification cost.

This effort is part of the goal to reduce the reliance on formal verification experts in DARPA’s PROVERS program, where Proofcraft is part of the INSPECTA team led by Collins Aerospace. Proofcraft will deliver several streams of work to reduce the reliance on proof experts when using seL4 as a trustworthy foundation in security and safety-critical systems. One of these streams is the generalisation and automation of platform port verification. Porting seL4 to a new platform involves determining which architecture the platform runs on (e.g., Arm v7, Intel x64, or RISC-V 64), which devices are included, at which memory addresses they reside, etc. These lead to configuration parameters for the kernel and the definition of a set of constants.

At the start of the project, the seL4 proofs were intricately dependent on these configu ration constants and parameters. This resulted in the need to involve a verification expert to update the proofs for even simple changes. This explains the low proportion of verified configurations: when INSPECTA started, seL4’s formal proofs held for only 5 platforms, one per main architecture (Arm 32-bit, Arm 32-bit HYP, Arm 64-bit HYP, RISC-V and Intel), while seL4 was supported across 29 platforms (22 for Arm, 5 for RISC-V and 2 for Intel), and more than 120 configuration options.

In the talk we will explain the automation, abstraction and parametrisation techniques we are developing to make the seL4 proofs generic in a number of parameters. This will deliver two main outcomes: firstly, developers will be able to choose freely between boards supported by seL4 without being unduly constrained by formal verification support for their system; secondly, companies porting seL4 to a new specific board will be able to benefit from seL4 proofs at zero extra effort and without verification expertise.

The adoption of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in the aviation domain raises the need for high performance computing solutions that satisfy domain intrinsic safety demands. Heterogeneous computing System on Chips (SoCs) – systems containing a classical Central Processing Unit (CPU) and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) – can satisfy the computing demands by offloading computationally intensive tasks from the CPU to dedicated hardware accelerators on the FPGA, while both CPU and FPGA comply with aviation safety standards. The typically static configuration of accelerators limits the overall system flexibility, making dynamic accelerator configuration desirable.

This presentation aims to establish a Reconfigurable Computing (RC) hypervisor that facilitates the outsourcing of acceleration tasks and introduces hardware reconfiguration capabilities, all while maintaining safety and high performance.

This work designs and implements a hypervisor extension that attaches to a classical software hypervisor (Microkit on top of seL4) and provides both acceleration support and reconfiguration capabilities of the FPGA resource. On the hardware side, the extension connects to a custom designed hardware-based hypervisor, which manages acceleration and reconfiguration tasks locally. On the software side, it provides an interface for user applications to access the acceleration capabilities. Interactions between user applications and the hypervisor in the software domain, between the accelerator and the hardware hypervisor circuit in the hardware domain, and between the software and hardware domains themselves are thoroughly considered to consolidate the overall design. A proof-of-concept demonstrator of the RC hypervisor is evaluated for performance and compliance with aviation safety standards.

At the 2024 summit we presented Atoll, a new seL4-based hypervisor platform built from the ground up to achieve seL4-level provable isolation between client VMs in a cloud hosting environment. Atoll differs from most existing seL4 applications in targeting "big iron" machines: servers with hundreds of cores, terabytes of main memory, and hundreds of Gbps of network bandwidth. This presents some unique challenges, and stresses the seL4 model and implementation in new and sometimes unexpected ways.

In this talk, we will report our experiences after a year of intensive design and development and present recommendations for the future direction of seL4 to support such machines. We will focus particularly on both the benefits and limitations of the statically-partitioned multikernel model (the agreed path to multicore seL4): which limitations can be easily worked around, which take more effort, and which may require changes in seL4 itself.

We will cover the essential aspects of hardware support for modern self virtualising architectures. This includes SR-IOV, first-class IOMMU support, interrupt virtualisation, and the secure and correct initialisation of a (mostly) static seL4 system from a dynamic boot environment e.g. ACPI and UEFI. We intend this presentation to serve as an entry point for an in-depth discussion of the future of seL4 on modern non-embedded hardware.

Using seL4, we can build systems that include both critical and untrusted user-space components, with high confidence that there can be no unintended interactions between components. But how do we gain confidence that critical components and their composition correctly implement system requirements? To answer this, Kry10 is developing a framework for verifying systems of user-space components running on seL4.

We have several goals for our framework:

• Write specifications as abstract programs, and prove that implementations respect them.
• Reason compositionally about components and subsystems that execute concurrently, and that are intended to run indefinitely.
• Reason about systems that create and destroy seL4 kernel objects.
• Reflect seL4's separation guarantees into the reasoning principles of the logic.

As in the seL4 verification, we write abstract specifications as programs shallowly embedded in an interactive theorem prover, and aim to prove functional correctness by refinement. However, to describe processes that run indefinitely, and their interactions with their environments, we use a coinductive construction in the style of interaction trees.

For reasoning about compositions of components and their interactions, we aim to support a combination of techniques from process algebra and separation logic. We are using the base logic of Iris, a concurrent separation logic implemented in the Rocq Prover. However, we are building our own program logic, so that we can model threads that are waiting to be unblocked or scheduled, as well as threads that can be deleted.

Our framework is work in progress. In this talk, we'll describe what we have so far, and our plans for further development. Currently, we are focussing on finding the right concepts for verifying system safety properties up to functional correctness and integrity. In future, we aim for a program logic that is faithful to the seL4 abstract specification, at least for the subclass of system configurations of interest to Kry10.

This work is funded by the Agentur für Innovation in Cybersicherheit GmbH (Cyberagentur), Germany.

This talk presents an approach to device driver verification using separation logic developed at BlueRock Security. Using the PL011 UART and simple-mode ZynqMP DMA devices as examples, the talk will demonstrate how to use Iris-style ghost state and invariants to embed the operational semantics of devices in the specifications of MMIO operations. The proof of each driver sets up a device protocol showing how the state of the device evolves over time, e.g. from DMA copy to DMA idle. Each driver proof also establishes that the combined behavior of the device and the driver preserve this invariant. The proofs are built using BlueRock Security's BRiCk program logic for concurrent C++. The talk will touch on potential applications of device protocols within the seL4 ecosystem.

There are two, simultaneous revolutions happening in the world software right now. The obvious one, which gets most of the attention, money, and talk-time is Artificial Intelligence. The other, which is just as momentous a change, is Formal Methods at scale.

The collective We in this community may have differences of opinion on the details, but collectively We are the cutting edge of the Formal Methods revolution. What we are creating together is no less than the field of Software Engineering, which thus far has been craftwork.

This talk comes in two parts. First, we define and explore Science, Engineering, Craftwork, and Magic, and why the field of software development has misapplied the terms.

The second part gets real about why formal proofs are required, implications that has on OS design, and more importantly system design.

Safety Critical devices, whether in civilian infrastructure, mobility, or defense depends more than ever on complex software. The implications on certification are profound and that is the key to understanding how to move beyond academic and narrow deployments that community currently supports.

The seL4 microkernel is a solid foundation for building fault-tolerant systems: a failed system component is unlikely to completely bring down the whole system, and potentially there is an opportunity to restart the failed component and restore its normal service. However, deploying the detection and recovery mechanisms on a dynamic system is still challenging for the following reasons:

1. Accurate and low-overhead fault detection is tricky. The monitor and the components being monitored should minimise interference. For instance, the monitor should be able to check if a component is alive, but the monitor's normal execution must not be interfered by the component.
2. Restarting drivers is straight-forward, since they usually only talk with a few servers. However, a system server, such as a file server, shared by applications keeps some states of its clients. Thus, it is not trivial to recover the states if the server is restarted. Furthermore, all the clients need to reconnect with the new server instance and restart the interrupted requests transparently.
3. Some kernel supports may be needed. For instance, when a server fails, the kernel needs to wake up the clients that are still waiting on the reply caps so that the clients can perform the recovery steps as well.

In this talk, we will present the progress of building dependable system services on seL4, discuss the approaches dealing with the challenges above, and learn the insights from the audiences.

Embedded systems are increasingly targeted by both criminal and nation state actors. One particularly challenging subdomain for embedded systems is space, posing additional concerns in the form of a harsh environment (e.g., radiation and temperature), inability to get physical access once launched, and tight coupling between hardware and software. Satellites need resilient software to face these challenges and yet software security has received little consideration to date.

As a result, several years ago we ported NASA’s core Flight Software (cFS) to seL4 to provide a secure foundation for satellite systems. cFS was developed by NASA Goddard over 20 years ago and is now widely deployed for scores of space missions (e.g., NASA Artemis, the Roman Space Telescope). Our analysis of cFS and its assumptions about its host OS led us to conclude that despite expected porting ease with the OS abstraction layer, significant functionality needed to be created on top of seL4.

This talk will focus on our analysis of the features required for cFS, our experience implementing that functionality and porting cFS to an seL4-based system, and how this led us to create the initial Magnetite operating system.

The goal of the INSPECTA project (part of the DARPA PROVERS program which started in 2024) is to improve the security of defense and aerospace systems by dramatically improving the usability, flexibility, and accessibility of formal methods-based development and verification tools. We will demonstrate the formal methods tools and workflow created on the program by addressing emerging security requirements for a Collins mission computing platform for unmanned air vehicles under development for military applications. This includes re-architecting the mission software as a collection of virtual machines running legacy code and selected high-criticality components, producing an architecture model for the system, porting selected software to Rust, building software to run on seL4,and verifying critical safety and security properties.

The team has completed our initial integration of seL4 with the Collins RapidEdge Collaborative Mission Autonomy software. The integrated software was able to successfully execute in hardware-in-the-loop simulation one of the autonomous multi-UAV missions flown last year at the US Army EDGE24 event. The RapidEdge software was run without modification in a secure virtual machine hosted on seL4, providing guaranteed isolation and control over all input and output interfaces.

This successful integration and demonstration provide the basis for further application of formal methods technologies in the coming phases of the PROVERS program and will result in verified cyber-resilience for the LE mission system. In addition to describing the integration and test effort, we will report on lessons learned, gaps identified, and next steps for the project.

Darren Cofer, Principal Fellow, Collins Aerospace

Darren Cofer is a Principal Fellow at Collins Aerospace. He earned his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. His area of expertise is developing and applying advanced analysis methods and tools for verification and certification of high-integrity systems. His background includes work with formal methods for system and software analysis, the design of real-time embedded systems for safety-critical applications, and the development of nuclear propulsion systems in the U.S. Navy. Dr. Cofer has served as principal investigator on many government-sponsored research programs, developing and using formal methods for verification of safety and security properties. He served on RTCA committee SC-205 developing new certification guidance for airborne software (DO-178C) and was one of the developers of the Formal Methods Supplement (DO-333). He is currently a member of SAE committee G-34 developing certification guidance for the use of machine learning technologies onboard aircraft.

Collins Aerospace, an RTX business, is a leader in integrated and intelligent solutions for the global aerospace and defense industry. Our 80,000 employees are dedicated to delivering future-focused technologies to advance sustainable and connected aviation, passenger safety and comfort, mission success, space exploration and more. The Applied Research & Technology team is a global technology and open innovation resource within Collins Aerospace working on mission-critical projects that push the boundaries of what technology can do. We work on the cutting edge, redefining our industry with innovative partners, government, and academia to research and advance transformative technologies that can create a safer, more connected, and sustainable world.

Robbie VanVossen, seL4 Technical Lead, DornerWorks

Robbie is an employee of DornerWorks, has 12 years of experience in embedded hypervisors, and 10 years of experience with the seL4 microkernel. His work and leadership led to the development of aarch64 virtualization support across the seL4 ecosystem, both in the microkernel and the user-space libraries. He has also developed multiple projects using the Rust language, including embedded implementations of device drivers and applications. He has strong interests in embedded security, virtualization, seL4, and Rust.

DornerWorks is a small, engineering services business serving companies in the aerospace, defense, medical, automotive, and consumer markets. DornerWorks has been utilizing seL4 for customers since 2015 with a focus on embedded virtualization. DornerWorks has helped with seL4 features such as improved aarch64 support in the microkernel and userspace, significantly improved virtualization support on multiple architectures, and ports to various platforms.

Boyd Multerer, CEO and Founder, Kry10

Boyd is the driving force behind Kry10 and leads technical development, overall strategy, and business.

Boyd is regarded as the Xbox father of invention. He spent over 18 years working for Microsoft and was responsible for Xbox Live, Microsoft’s gaming and entertainment service used by more than 46 million people worldwide. In 2012 he was named as one of Game Developer Magazine's Power 50, a list of people in the game industry who have stood out for outstanding contributions to the industry.

Kry10 offers a full-featured operating system on top of the seL4 kernel, along with tooling, services, key management and more. The Kry10 Platform is a fast and easy way to build highly secure, next-generation cyber-physical devices. It leverages the verification of seL4 to provide a secure, self-healing, truly dynamic system with minimal downtime, even during upgrades.

Kry10 is an Endorsed Service Provider of the seL4 Foundation, offering support to enable seL4-based secure projects to be affordable, maintainable, and remotely manageable.

Peter de Ridder, Head of software development, MEP

Peter de Ridder is Head of software development at MEP, where he started in 2007. He is working on the Voice communication products in the critical communication sector, where he has the lead in software architecture, design and development of the products.

Since it was founded in 1989, MEP has been developing and supplying Voice Communication Systems for critical applications in the Maritime and Aviation sectors. Traffic controllers worldwide rely on our systems. Thanks to our continuous innovation, we offer new solutions that improve safety and traffic flows. Vision: An increase in the volume of air, maritime and road traffic drives the constant need for new communication and management solutions to guarantee safety and improve capacity and efficiency. Mission: MEP is the best choice for innovative communication solutions that guarantee the effective communication of audio and related data for traffic controllers worldwide. MEP systems are reliable, scalable, exceptionally competitive, and offer continuity.

Yanyan Shen, OS Designer and Builder, NIO

Yanyan Shen is a principal systems software architect at NIO, leading the design and development of the vehicle operating system based on seL4. He is a long term member of the seL4 community and contributes to many aspects of seL4. He is interested in building dependable systems software including kernel, hypervisor, and OS framework. He earned his PhD in computer science and engineering from UNSW.

NIO is a pioneer and a leading company in the premium smart electric vehicle market. Founded in November 2014, NIO’s mission is to shape a joyful lifestyle. NIO aims to build a community starting with smart electric vehicles to share joy and grow together with users. NIO is a strong supporter of seL4 and a premium member of the seL4 Foundation. NIO’s full-domain smart EV operating system, SkyOS, trusts seL4 as the kernel for SkyOS-M and SkyOS-H.

Juliana Furgala, Cybersecurity Researcher, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (moderator)

Juliana Furgala is a technical staff member in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Currently she is researching secure and recoverable satellite systems. Interested in the pursuit of security-minded technology, she aims to develop lasting software that can stand the test of adversaries, not just the test of time. Her published research focuses on the needs of embedded and real-time systems.

To lower the barrier of entry into STEM, she is involved in a variety of academic and outreach efforts (e.g., founding LL EduCATE).

Furgala received her MS degree in cybersecurity in 2024 from Georgia Institute of Technology and her BS degree in computer science in 2019 from Tufts University, where she also minored in global premodern women’s history.

The Secure Resilient Systems and Technology group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory develops architectures and technologies for ensuring the security and resiliency of mission-critical cyber-physical systems, from drones and satellites to high-performance secure cloud computing.

In this talk, June Andronick, CEO of the seL4 Foundation, will give a brief overview of the latest updates and future plans for the seL4 Foundation.

The seL4 Foundation is home to the ecosystem of software, developers and adopters for safety- and security-critical systems based on seL4. It was formed in April 2020 as a neutral and community-based organisation that ensures long-term, independent support for seL4 and its ecosystem, and fosters strong community participation and ownership in the ecosystem. It raises funds for continuing and accelerating development, facilitates interoperability, standardisation and sharing of cost for the benefit of all. Its aim is to ensure that seL4 is not only the world’s best secure operating-system technology, but is readily deployable and supported by a diverse and stable ecosystem of services and products.

The Genode operating system framework [1] is an open-source tool kit, with quarterly releases per year since 2008 [2], for building component-based operating systems. It scales from rather static embedded appliances to highly dynamic general-purpose computing as showcased by Sculpt OS.

Sculpt OS [3][4] is an open-source general-purpose OS with two releases per year since 2018 [5]. It combines Genode's microkernel architecture, capability-based security, sandboxed device drivers, and virtual machines in a unique dynamic interactive operating system. It runs on commodity PC notebooks and ARM devices, in particular consumer focused devices like the PinePhone cellphone [6], the MNT Reform notebook [7] and on the MNT Pocket Reform mini notebook [8]. Features like on target updates and federated package provisioning of components make the Sculpt OS a enjoyable day-to-day OS for the Genode community.

Since its inception, the Genode framework supports various microkernels, e.g. various L4 kernels, even Linux and in particular seL4 since 2015 [9]. Even so seL4 is not supported with Sculpt OS officially, it's nevertheless in reach. Is it? As part of an experimental Sculpt OS demo image [10], it became clear, that several loose ends need to be picked up [11].

The talk will present the progress and the current state of Genode on seL4 and Sculpt OS in particular. The presentation will be given live on a Sculpt OS running on the seL4 kernel. Several typical general purpose use-cases and characteristic features of Sculpt OS will be demonstrated in order to give the audience an impression of the current interactive state of Sculpt OS on seL4.

[1] https://www.genode.org
[2] https://www.genode.org/documentation/release-notes/index
[3] https://www.genode.org/download/sculpt
[4] https://genode.org/documentation/articles/sculpt-25-04
[5] https://genode.org/download/sculpt-archive
[6] https://genodians.org/nfeske/2024-02-15-fosdem-aftermath
[7] https://genodians.org/skalk/2023-06-07-sculpt-23.04-mnt-reform2
[8] https://genodians.org/jws/2024-11-25-sculpt_mnt_pocket
[9] https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/microkernels_genode_sel4
[10] https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5768-celebrating-kernel-diversity-with-genode
[11] https://genode.org/documentation/release-notes/25.05#Improved_support_for_the_seL4_kernel

Several mechanisms exist to isolate applications (e.g., processes, VMs, containers, lwC).

However, there is no precise way to describe the differences in the resource isolation provided by each one, making it difficult to compare these mechanisms.

We introduce CellulOS, a custom-built seL4-based operating system that exposes protection domain state in a manner that enables developers and infrastructure providers to reason about the resources shared between two protection domains. The state is exposed as proposed in the Osmosis model.

OSmosis is a formal model that allows developers and infrastructure providers to reason about the resources shared between two protection domains. It represents resources, protection domains, and their relationships as a graph. Queries on this graph return sets of resources and/or protection domains, revealing information about confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Using these queries, we define a protection domain’s trusted computing base, identifying the domains upon which it relies, and its impact boundary, identifying those domains affected by a faulty or malicious domain.

The talk will cover CellulOS's architecture, the application of the OSmosis model to its design, its current capabilities as an OS, and how a capability-based uKernel facilitates the application of OSmosis to an OS. We will also discuss the challenges faced in bootstrapping an seL4 project from the perspective of a small group of graduate students, the extensive support provided by the seL4 community, an overview of the components we ported (VMM, SQLite, xv6FS, block driver), and our design for deadlock avoidance.

Wiki for CellulOS: https://cellulosdocs.readthedocs.io/en/cellulos/index.html

While the seL4 microkernel provides exceptional guarantees due to its formal verification, that isn’t always enough on its own to meet high-assurance requirements. Some user applications built on top of the microkernel will need stronger confidence than just the known isolation from other applications. There are multiple ways to improve confidence in the correctness of an application, such as using a memory-safe language, thorough testing, and formal verification. I have created an seL4-based system that utilizes a firewall application written in Rust. The application eventually used all of these approaches to gain high confidence in its functional correctness.

The system was generated with Kansas State University’s (KSU’s) HAMR toolchain which connects a Rust-based, low-level ethernet driver via the firewall to a VM. This allows for the ethernet device and driver to be fully isolated from the VM and for security functionality to be completely separate from the implementation of the VM.

I will discuss the evolution of this system and the firewall application. I will discuss the benefits provided by HAMR as well as some of the challenges of using the tool, with special focus on the model and the GUMBO contracts that help formalize the requirements into specification which can be used for test generation and formal verification. I will provide further details about the property-based testing and the verification effort utilizing Verus, including some metrics that were gathered on the code and the effort.

We report on our effort to verify a high-performance, portable, pure IPv6 network stack written in C. Currently, our stack includes compliant implementations of the Ethernet, IPv6, UDP, and ICMPv6 layers. Our verification efforts center on showing our C implementation is a refinement of an abstract specification manually derived from official prose-based specifications. We developed our proof with Isabelle/HOL using the AutoCorres2 framework.

SureVoice Solid is running at the heart of the SureVoice Voice Control System (VCS), used by air traffic and maritime controllers to communicate with pilots and captains of ships. MEP is a company developing and supplying voice communication systems for critical applications in the Maritime and Aviation sectors worldwide. MEP has chosen to run SureVoice on seL4 to guarantee 24/7 availability. The seL4 platform provides the separation of functionalities in the SureVoice Solid to ensure safety and secure operation.

This talk will explain why we choosen seL4, how we handle mixed criticality and modular software on top of seL4, and the platform it is running on.

This talk will discuss recent and ongoing seL4-related research and development at UNSW’s Trustworthy Systems group. It will provide a general overview and then focus on the system side of our current work, to be complemented by Thomas Sewell’s and Junming Zhao’s talks that will focus on verification activities.

Specifically this talk will cover work on kernel enhancements required for energy and thermal management, including on- and off-lining of cores and the implied migration of threads between cores. This is complemented by extensions of the Microkit.

I will further cover or work on maturing the seL4 device driver framework (sDDF), including further performance improvements and new device classes, and progress on LionsOS and what we have learnt about inherent performance limitations (or lack thereof) of modular microkernel-based OSes. I will also cover early-stage work on two other projects:

1. Carrels: Secure micro-services on seL4, and
2. Djawula: Provably secure, general-purpose OS on seL4.

We are all familiar with the verification of the seL4 kernel, completed in 2009, and the growth of a community of developers building systems on top of seL4. Many of these systems themselves contain verified components or have a verified design. The challenge of assembling a multi-component seL4 application that is verified in total, to the same standard as the kernel itself, remains to be solved.

A crucial part of the challenge is concurrency. The kernel is never preempted, and so, on a single-threaded CPU, it runs without any concurrency concerns. Its verification can ignore concurrency and treat kernel entry events as “black box” transitions from input state to output state. User level tasks cannot avoid concurrency. Even on a single-threaded CPU, they may be preempted, and exist within the appearance of a concurrent environment. Verification of user level tasks in context requires a concurrent semantics, which is much more complicated.

This talk is about one specific aspect of the problem. We would like the user level concurrent semantics to mesh with the verified kernel semantics, with, for instance, the meaning of system calls connected to their meaning in the kernel API. For these purposes, the existing “black box” treatment of the kernel creates some complications. A system call at user level triggers a kernel entry, but the resulting kernel execution may perform other tasks in addition to handling the system call.

We aim to address this by introducing a new variant of the seL4 abstract spec that splits compound events. I will report on our progress in verifying that the variant abstract spec is equivalent, and outline our plan to use this alternative specification to construct a multi-timeline system semantics.

Device driver bugs are the leading cause of OS compromises, and their formal verification is therefore highly desirable. To the best of our knowledge, no realistic and performant driver has been verified for a non-trivial device.

In 2024 seL4 Summit, we introduced Pancake, an imperative language for system programming that features a verified compiler and a well-defined, verification friendly semantics. We now have integrated Pancake into Viper SMT verification infrastructure via an automatic transpiler to establish end-to-end functional correctness for Pancake programs. We have formally verified a performant real-world Ethernet driver using this framework.

In this talk, we present the driver verification workflow, Viper front-end encodings for Pancake, the verified device driver performance and the future challenges to extend the framework to other seL4-based system components.

In the realm of Confidential Computing, the advent of technologies such as AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX, Arm CCA, and RISC-V COVE introduces essential protection capabilities to the cloud. While these innovations significantly bolster VM security against hypervisors, communication endpoints of the VMs still leave an open attack surface for malicious actors. Traditional monolithic guest OSes, particularly Linux, exacerbate these risks due to their large code size and kernel-space drivers, which are attractive targets for attackers. Drivers in the Linux kernel generally treat the hardware/hypervisor to be trustworthy and don't consider that path in the attacker model.

This talk proposes the use of seL4, a microkernel with user-space drivers, as a more suitable guest OS for Confidential VMs (CVMs). With its small code size and formal verification, seL4 presents a robust alternative that reduces the attack surface.

The current state of the endeavor for one specific technology will be discussed, as well as remaining tasks, potential use-cases and possible steps forward.

The Cyberagentur has launched its research program “Ecosystem formally verifiable IT – provable Cybersecurity (EvIT)” to take cybersecurity to the next level. It encompasses what the creators of seL4 set out to achieve but goes even further: in addition to kernel and operating system, the goal is to verify the entire IT stack. Five research projects are funded with partners from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. They take complementary approaches over the next four years or so, including: extending the seL4 microkernel to allow multikernel operation, to harden it against side-channel attacks, to allow verification of device drivers, and to support the creation of seL4-based operating systems; verifying a unikernel operating system written in Rust and the RISC V-based microprocessor it runs on in a single, holistic verification approach; a compositional approach to verifying hardware, ISA, and operating system; and extending a functional hardware description language for ASICs and FPGAs to allow formal verification of both hardware and software designs. In addition, a community building program aims to make the benefits of formal verification known more widely, both to attract future talent to the field and to broaden its adoption.

The vision driving the program is introducing a new cybersecurity paradigm: security by design, not as an afterthought. More research will be necessary both taking the topics covered in EvIT even further, and covering more aspects outside of EvIT. One intriguing speculation I like to indulge in is to employ formal verification as an alternative to certification. I would like to kickstart a debate on whether that is feasible and likely to succeed.

seL4’s functional correctness proofs certify that the kernel’s C implementation is a refinement of its abstract specification. Binary verification refers to the process of certifying that the compiled kernel binary is a refinement of its C implementation, completing the kernel’s end-to-end functional correctness argument and providing assurance that the kernel’s security properties are satisfied all the way down to the binary level. In particular, binary verification enables us to remove the compiler from our trusted computing base, eliminating concerns about bugs in sophisticated compiler optimization passes or differences between the compiler’s C semantics and those used by the functional correctness proofs.

seL4’s binary verification toolchain consists of three components: a verified decompiler that lifts assembly into a common interchange language called SydTV-GL; a verified translator that lowers C into SydTV-GL; and a tool that leverages SMT solvers to verify refinement between the two. The former component comes from Magnus Myreen and the HOL4 community, while the latter two come from Thomas Sewell and the seL4 community.

In this presentation, we will explore the design of this toolchain and report on our engineering efforts, funded by the seL4 Foundation, to maintain, improve, and extend it.