Formalising Filesystems in the ACL2 Theorem Prover: an Application to FAT32

Abstract: In this work, we present an approach towards constructing executable specifications of existing filesystems and verifying their functional properties in a theorem proving environment. We detail an application of this approach to the FAT32 filesystem. We also detail the methodology used to build up this type of executable specification through a series of models which incrementally add features of the target filesystem. This methodology has the benefit of allowing the verification effort to start from simple models which encapsulate features common to many filesystems and which are thus suitable for reuse.