A mini challenge: Build a verifiable filesystem

Abstract

We propose tackling a "mini challenge" problem: a nontrivial verification effort that can be completed in 2-3 years, and will help establish notational standards, common formats, and libraries of benchmarks that will be essential in order for the verification community to collaborate on meeting Hoare's 15-year verification grand challenge. We believe that a suitable candidate for such a mini challenge is the development of a filesystem that is verifiably reliable and secure. The paper argues why we believe a filesystem is the right candidate for a mini challenge and describes a project in which we are building a small embedded filesystem for use with flash memory. © British Computer Society 2007.