As embedded systems become more complex, more connected and more involved in critical tasks, the question of how strict security analysis can be performed during embedded system design needs to be thoroughly addressed. In this thesis, we study how automated formal verification can help embedded system designers in evaluating the impact of hardware and software modifications on the security of the whole system.
One of the specificities of embedded system design-which is of particular interest for formal verification-is that the system under design is described as interacting hardware and software components. Formally verifying these systems requires taking both types of components into account. To illustrate this fact, we propose an example of a hardware/software co-design (based on Intel SGX) that provides a secure channel between a peripheral and an application. Formal verification can be performed on this system at different levels: from a high-level view (without describing the implementations) or from a low-level implementation. These two cases differ in terms of how tightly coupled the hardware and software components are.
For the high-level approach, we propose a model-based approach-for both the partitioning and software design phases- which enables us to describe software and hardware with high-level models and enables a transformation of these models into a formal specification which can be formally analyzed by the ProVerif tool. For the low-level approach, we consider a software implementation and a more concrete description of hardware in order to analyze more precise security properties with ProVerif.
