Cogent: Verifying High-Assurance File System Implementations

We present an approach to writing and formally verifying high-assurance file-system code in a restricted language called COGENT, supported by a certifying compiler that produces C code, high-level specification of COGENT, and translation correctness proofs. The language is strongly typed and guarantees absence of a number of common file system implementation errors. We show how verification effort is drastically reduced for proving higher-level properties of the file system implementation by reasoning about the generated formal specification rather than its low-level C code. We use the framework to write two Linux file systems, and compare their performance with their native C implementations.