Keith Simmons

Computer scientists use formal verification to attempt to provide guarentees to the users of software about the run time characteristics of a given program. Verification techniques today often require a TCB or Trusted Code Base which due to time or effort constraints, the authors were not able to prove correct. When bugs occure in these pieces, they break down the strong guarentees of formal verification and devalue the extra time spent to complete it. In many cases, the verification of such a component could be reused in other projects, but not many mechanisms are in place to do so, especially when it comes to sharing libraries in coq beyond the standard library. We present Cheerios, a formally verified library for serializing coq data types and writing serializers for custom types to be stored or sent over the wire. Cheerios uses modern software development practices to ensure it is easily readable and understandable. It also has a clear path for extending its standard library of serializable types with proof tactics which make proving the correctness of the new serializers relatively simple and provides the needed lemmas for users of Cheerios to immediately get up and running quickly with their project. The verdi project has been critisized for not having a verified serializer and deserializer. [6, 5] To demonstrate Cheerios’ utility we integrated it with the verdi project replacing the current usage of Ocaml’s standard library marshalling functions with Cheerios and developed a vst for distributed systems in verdi which uses Cheerios to allow system creators to develop their own serializers instead of relying on the Ocaml marshalling library.