1,557 research outputs found

    Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

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    Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

    Parameterized Verification of Safety Properties in Ad Hoc Network Protocols

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    We summarize the main results proved in recent work on the parameterized verification of safety properties for ad hoc network protocols. We consider a model in which the communication topology of a network is represented as a graph. Nodes represent states of individual processes. Adjacent nodes represent single-hop neighbors. Processes are finite state automata that communicate via selective broadcast messages. Reception of a broadcast is restricted to single-hop neighbors. For this model we consider a decision problem that can be expressed as the verification of the existence of an initial topology in which the execution of the protocol can lead to a configuration with at least one node in a certain state. The decision problem is parametric both on the size and on the form of the communication topology of the initial configurations. We draw a complete picture of the decidability and complexity boundaries of this problem according to various assumptions on the possible topologies.Comment: In Proceedings PACO 2011, arXiv:1108.145

    Model Checking Paxos in Spin

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    We present a formal model of a distributed consensus algorithm in the executable specification language Promela extended with a new type of guards, called counting guards, needed to implement transitions that depend on majority voting. Our formalization exploits abstractions that follow from reduction theorems applied to the specific case-study. We apply the model checker Spin to automatically validate finite instances of the model and to extract preconditions on the size of quorums used in the election phases of the protocol.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2014, arXiv:1408.556

    Graph- versus Vector-Based Analysis of a Consensus Protocol

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    The Paxos distributed consensus algorithm is a challenging case-study for standard, vector-based model checking techniques. Due to asynchronous communication, exhaustive analysis may generate very large state spaces already for small model instances. In this paper, we show the advantages of graph transformation as an alternative modelling technique. We model Paxos in a rich declarative transformation language, featuring (among other things) nested quantifiers, and we validate our model using the GROOVE model checker, a graph-based tool that exploits isomorphism as a natural way to prune the state space via symmetry reductions. We compare the results with those obtained by the standard model checker Spin on the basis of a vector-based encoding of the algorithm.Comment: In Proceedings GRAPHITE 2014, arXiv:1407.767

    Formal verification of secure ad-hoc network routing protocols using deductive model-checking

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    Ad-hoc networks do not rely on a pre-installed infrastructure, but they are formed by end-user devices in a self-organized manner. A consequence of this principle is that end-user devices must also perform routing functions. However, end-user devices can easily be compromised, and they may not follow the routing protocol faithfully. Such compromised and misbehaving nodes can disrupt routing, and hence, disable the operation of the network. In order to cope with this problem, several secured routing protocols have been proposed for ad-hoc networks. However, many of them have design flaws that still make them vulnerable to attacks mounted by compromised nodes. In this paper, we propose a formal verification method for secure ad-hoc network routing protocols that helps increasing the confidence in a protocol by providing an analysis framework that is more systematic, and hence, less error-prone than the informal analysis. Our approach is based on a new process calculus that we specifically developed for secure ad-hoc network routing protocols and a deductive proof technique. The novelty of this approach is that contrary to prior attempts to formal verification of secure ad-hoc network routing protocols, our verification method can be made fully automated
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