Layered Formal Verification of a TCP Stack

Abstract

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) at the heart of TCP/IP protocol stacks is a critical part of our current digital infrastructure. In this article, we show how an existing professional-grade open source embedded TCP/IP library can benefit from a formally verified TCP reimplementation. Our approach is to apply formal verification to the TCP layer only, relying on validated models of the lower layers on which it depends.