Is Formal Verification of seL4 Adequate to Address the Key Security Challenges of Kernel Design?

Formal method tools are used in the initial stages of the software development cycle and have advanced to deal with the design difficulties related to ensuring strong cybersecurity and reliability in high-assurance systems. Operating system kernels are the security keystone of most computer systems. Their continuous advances require formal verification that guarantees the accuracy of their functionalities. As the world’s first microkernel to be proven mathematically secure and functionally correct, seL4 has been adopted for use in a range of critical systems, including defense, aerospace, and financial services applications. In spite of the great effort of the seL4 team to present a comprehensive formal verification of the kernels, there are some security aspects of verification that suffer from a limited scope. From an outsider’s perspective, this paper aims to evaluate if seL4 formal verification is adequate to address security requirements and surveys the recent state of the art for seL4 microkernels.