Toward a Methodology for Unified Verification of Hardware / Software Co-designs

Critical and private applications of smart and connected objects such as health-related objects are now common, thus raising the need to design these objects with strong security guarantees. Many recent works offer practical hardware-assisted security solutions that take advantage of a tight cooperation between hardware and software to provide system-level security guarantees. Formally and consistently proving the efficiency of these solutions raises challenges since software and hardware verifications approaches generally rely on different representations. The paper first sketches an ideal security verification solution naturally handling both hardware and software components. Next, it proposes an evaluation of formal verification methods that have already been proposed for mixed hardware/software systems, with regards to the ideal method. At last, the paper presents a conceptual approach to this ideal method relying on ProVerif, and applies this approach to a remote attestation system (SMART).