Formal Verification of Secure Boot Process

Formal verification is widely used for checking the correctness of a system with respect to the succinct properties at early design phase. In recent times, these methods are also adopted to validate the security of a system by rightly abstracting the security-oriented properties. In this work, we focus on a recently reported attack on the secure boot process of Zynq-7000 platform. We study the vulnerability with formal analysis of its boot loader code. The challenge is to model the system and identify the right set of properties so that, the vulnerability is exposed quickly. It is shown that the UPPAAL model checking analysis can be used, which helps to find the vulnerability instantaneously with the help of four properties and a virtual memory usage peak of about 50MB to test each property. To the best of our knowledge, we perform the first analysis of UPPAAL on a concrete software implementation and perform a case study on a real security vulnerability reported in a CVE [1].