Formal Verification of Data Modifications in Cloud Block Storage Based on Separation Logic

Abstract

Cloud storage is now widely used, but its reliability has always been a major concern. Cloud block storage (CBS) is a famous type of cloud storage. It has the closest architecture to the underlying storage and can provide interfaces for other types. Data modifications in CBS have potential risks such as null reference or data loss. Formal verification of these operations can improve the reliability of CBS to some extent. Although separation logic is a mainstream approach to verifying program correctness, the complex architecture of CBS creates some challenges for verifications. This paper develops a proof system based on separation logic for verifying the CBS data modifications. The proof system can represent the CBS architecture, describe the properties of the CBS system state, and specify the behavior of CBS data modifications. Using the interactive verification approach from Coq, the proof system is implemented as a verification tool. With this tool, the paper builds machine-checked proofs for the functional correctness of CBS data modifications. This work can thus analyze the reliability of cloud storage from a formal perspective.