Towards a Formal Semantics for System Calls in terms of Information Flow

We propose a new semantics for system calls, which focuses on the information flows they generate in a UNIX OS. We built a prototypal model of an OS and system calls using the concurrent transaction logic along with its interpreter. We have yet a few results and applications that show the usefulness of our semantics to model an OS from a kernel point of view. Once completed, we expect our semantics to enable us to extensively test security software implemented inside the kernel, among other use cases.