Verifying an HTTP Key-Value Server with Interaction Trees and VST

by Hengchu Zhang, Wolf Honoré, Nicolas Koh, Yao Li, Yishuai Li, Li-yao Xia, Lennart Beringer, William Mansky, Benjamin Pierce, Steve Zdancewic

12th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving, ITP 2021

 Paper (Open Access)  Artifact

We present a networked key-value server, implemented in C and formally verified in Coq. The server interacts with clients using a subset of the HTTP/1.1 protocol and is specified and verified using interaction trees and the Verified Software Toolchain. The codebase includes a reusable and fully verified C string library that provides 17 standard POSIX string functions and 17 general purpose non-POSIX string functions. For the KVServer socket system calls, we establish a refinement relation between specifications at user-space level and at CertiKOS kernel-space level.