Using HOL To Produce Custom Verification Tools

Abstract

HOL is a general purpose verification tool and as such has been applied to many verification problems. However, due to its generality it is not as eficient as a specially written tool would be. This paper demonstrates how HOL can be used to generate a special purpose tool whose correctness has been established through proof. This is shown through an example of some work pelformed as part of the IMS T9000 design and explains how this could be turn, with improvements, into a more general technique. It should be understood that this paper does not set out to demonstrate a method for verifying ROM compaction but uses this task as an illustration of a potential technique for developing secure special purpose tools.