Auditable Restoration of Distributed Programs

We focus on a protocol for auditable restoration of distributed systems. The need for such protocol arises due to conflicting requirements (e.g., access to the system should be restricted but emergency access should be provided). One can design such systems with a tamper detection approach (based on the intuition of "break the glass door"). However, in a distributed system, such tampering, which are denoted as auditable events, is visible only for a single node. This is unacceptable since the actions they take in these situations can be different than those in the normal mode. Moreover, eventually, the auditable event needs to be cleared so that system resumes the normal operation. With this motivation, in this paper, we present a protocol for auditable restoration, where any process can potentially identify an auditable event. Whenever a new auditable event occurs, the system must reach an "auditable state" where every process is aware of the auditable event. Only after the system reaches an auditable state, it can begin the operation of restoration. Although any process can observe an auditable event, we require that only "authorized" processes can begin the task of restoration. Moreover, these processes can begin the restoration only when the system is in an auditable state. Our protocol is self-stabilizing and has bounded state space. It can effectively handle the case where faults or auditable events occur during the restoration protocol. Moreover, it can be used to provide auditable restoration to other distributed protocol.Comment: 10 page

On the Limits and Practice of Automatically Designing Self-Stabilization

A protocol is said to be self-stabilizing when the distributed system executing it is guaranteed to recover from any fault that does not cause permanent damage. Designing such protocols is hard since they must recover from all possible states, therefore we investigate how feasible it is to synthesize them automatically. We show that synthesizing stabilization on a fixed topology is NP-complete in the number of system states. When a solution is found, we further show that verifying its correctness on a general topology (with any number of processes) is undecidable, even for very simple unidirectional rings. Despite these negative results, we develop an algorithm to synthesize a self-stabilizing protocol given its desired topology, legitimate states, and behavior. By analogy to shadow puppetry, where a puppeteer may design a complex puppet to cast a desired shadow, a protocol may need to be designed in a complex way that does not even resemble its specification. Our shadow/puppet synthesis algorithm addresses this concern and, using a complete backtracking search, has automatically designed 4 new self-stabilizing protocols with minimal process space requirements: 2-state maximal matching on bidirectional rings, 5-state token passing on unidirectional rings, 3-state token passing on bidirectional chains, and 4-state orientation on daisy chains

Self-stabilizing sorting algorithms

A distributed system consists of a set of machines which do not share a global memory. Depending on the connectivity of the network, each machine gets a partial view of the global state. Transient failures in one area of the network may go unnoticed in other areas and may cause the system to go to an illegal global state. However, if the system were self-stabilizing, it would be guaranteed that regardless of the current state, the system would recover to a legal configuration in a finite number of moves; The traditional way of creating reliable systems is to make redundant components. Self-stabilization allows systems to be fault tolerant through software as well. This is an evolving paradigm in the design of robust distributed systems. The ability to recover spontaneously from an arbitrary state makes self-stabilizing systems immune to transient failures or perturbations in the system state such as changes in network topology; This thesis presents an O(nh) fault-tolerant distributed sorting algorithm for a tree network, where n is the number of nodes in the system, and h is the height of the tree. Fault-tolerance is achieved using Dijkstra\u27s paradigm of self-stabilization which is a method of non-masking fault-tolerance embedding the fault-tolerance within the algorithm. Varghese\u27s counter flushing method is used in order to achieve synchronization among processes in the system. In the distributed sorting problem each node is given a value and an id which are non-corruptible. The idea is to have each node take a specific value based on its id. The algorithm handles transient faults by weeding out false information in the system. Nodes can start with completely false information concerning the values and ids of the system yet the intended behavior is still achieved. Also, nodes are allowed to crash and re-enter the system later as well as allowing new nodes to enter the system

Automated Synthesis of Timed and Distributed Fault-Tolerant Systems

This dissertation concentrates on the problem of automated synthesis and repair of fault-tolerant systems. In particular, given the required specification of the system, our goal is to synthesize a fault-tolerant system, or repair an existing one. We study this problem for two classes of timed and distributed systems. In the context of timed systems, we focus on efficient synthesis of fault-tolerant timed models from their fault-intolerant version. Although the complexity of the synthesis problem is known to be polynomial time in the size of the time-abstract bisimulation of the input model, the state of the art lacked synthesis algorithms that can be efficiently implemented. This is in part due to the fact that synthesis is in general a challenging problem and its complexity is significantly magnified in the context of timed systems. We propose an algorithm that takes a timed automaton, a set of fault actions, and a set of safety and bounded-time response properties as input, and utilizes a space-efficient symbolic representation of the timed automaton (called the zone graph) to synthesize a fault-tolerant timed automaton as output. The output automaton satisfies strict phased recovery, where it is guaranteed that the output model behaves similarly to the input model in the absence of faults and in the presence of faults, fault recovery is achieved in two phases, each satisfying certain safety and timing constraints. In the context of distributed systems, we study the problem of synthesizing fault-tolerant systems from their intolerant versions, when the number of processes is unknown. To synthesize a distributed fault-tolerant protocol that works for systems with any number of processes, we use counter abstraction. Using this abstraction, we deal with a finite-state abstract model to do the synthesis. Applying our proposed algorithm, we successfully synthesized a fault-tolerant distributed agreement protocol in the presence of Byzantine fault. Although the synthesis problem is known to be NP-complete in the state space of the input protocol (due to partial observability of processes) in the non-parameterized setting, our parameterized algorithm manages to synthesize a solution for a complex problem such as Byzantine agreement within less than two minutes. A system may reach a bad state due to wrong initialization or fault occurrence. One of the well-known types of distributed fault-tolerant systems are self-stabilizing systems. These are the systems that converge to their legitimate states starting from any state, and if no fault occurs, stay in legitimate states thereafter. We propose an automated sound and complete method to synthesize self-stabilizing systems starting from the desired topology and type of the system. Our proposed method is based on SMT-solving, where the desired specification of the system is formulated as SMT constraints. We used the Alloy solver to implement our method, and successfully synthesized some of the well-known self-stabilizing algorithms. We extend our method to support a type of stabilizing algorithm called ideal-stabilization, and also the case when the set of legitimate states is not explicitly known. Quantitative metrics such as recovery time are crucial in self-stabilizing systems when used in practice (such as in networking applications). One of these metrics is the average recovery time. Our automated method for synthesizing self-stabilizing systems generate some solution that respects the desired system specification, but it does not take into account any quantitative metrics. We study the problem of repairing self-stabilizing systems (where only removal of transitions is allowed) to satisfy quantitative limitations. The metric under study is average recovery time, which characterizes the performance of stabilizing programs. We show that the repair problem is NP-complete in the state space of the given system

SAVCBS 2004 Specification and Verification of Component-Based Systems: Workshop Proceedings

This is the proceedings of the 2004 SAVCBS workshop. The workshop is concerned with how formal (i.e., mathematical) techniques can be or should be used to establish a suitable foundation for the specification and verification of component-based systems. Component-based systems are a growing concern for the software engineering community. Specification and reasoning techniques are urgently needed to permit composition of systems from components. Component-based specification and verification is also vital for scaling advanced verification techniques such as extended static analysis and model checking to the size of real systems. The workshop considers formalization of both functional and non-functional behavior, such as performance or reliability

Emerging trends proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics: TPHOLs 2004

technical reportThis volume constitutes the proceedings of the Emerging Trends track of the 17th International Conference on Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics (TPHOLs 2004) held September 14-17, 2004 in Park City, Utah, USA. The TPHOLs conference covers all aspects of theorem proving in higher order logics as well as related topics in theorem proving and verification. There were 42 papers submitted to TPHOLs 2004 in the full research cate- gory, each of which was refereed by at least 3 reviewers selected by the program committee. Of these submissions, 21 were accepted for presentation at the con- ference and publication in volume 3223 of Springer?s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. In keeping with longstanding tradition, TPHOLs 2004 also offered a venue for the presentation of work in progress, where researchers invite discussion by means of a brief introductory talk and then discuss their work at a poster session. The work-in-progress papers are held in this volume, which is published as a 2004 technical report of the School of Computing at the University of Utah

Proceedings of the Sixth NASA Langley Formal Methods (LFM) Workshop

Today's verification techniques are hard-pressed to scale with the ever-increasing complexity of safety critical systems. Within the field of aeronautics alone, we find the need for verification of algorithms for separation assurance, air traffic control, auto-pilot, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), adaptive avionics, automated decision authority, and much more. Recent advances in formal methods have made verifying more of these problems realistic. Thus we need to continually re-assess what we can solve now and identify the next barriers to overcome. Only through an exchange of ideas between theoreticians and practitioners from academia to industry can we extend formal methods for the verification of ever more challenging problem domains. This volume contains the extended abstracts of the talks presented at LFM 2008: The Sixth NASA Langley Formal Methods Workshop held on April 30 - May 2, 2008 in Newport News, Virginia, USA. The topics of interest that were listed in the call for abstracts were: advances in formal verification techniques; formal models of distributed computing; planning and scheduling; automated air traffic management; fault tolerance; hybrid systems/hybrid automata; embedded systems; safety critical applications; safety cases; accident/safety analysis

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

This book is Open Access under a CC BY licence. The LNCS 11427 and 11428 proceedings set constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2019, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, in April 2019, held as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2019. The total of 42 full and 8 short tool demo papers presented in these volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 164 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: SAT and SMT, SAT solving and theorem proving; verification and analysis; model checking; tool demo; and machine learning. Part II: concurrent and distributed systems; monitoring and runtime verification; hybrid and stochastic systems; synthesis; symbolic verification; and safety and fault-tolerant systems