First Steps to Automated Driver Verification via Model Checking

The paper summarizes the current state of our work addressing the verification of Windows kernel drivers via model checking technique. Our goal is to implement a tool that extracts verification models using driver source code and specifications of the kernel environment written in DeSpec language, which we introduced previously. The DeSpec language enables specifying the kernel environment as well as the rules imposed on drivers. The DeSpec Model Extractor tool builds a Zing model capturing those parts of the driver and kernel behavior related to a selected subset of the specification rules. Processing the resulting model in the Zing model checker could reveal the errors in the driver that are commonly difficult to discover via traditional methods of software testing due to the concurrency and complexity of the Windows kernel.