2,906 research outputs found
Parameterized Synthesis Case Study: AMBA AHB (extended version)
We revisit the AMBA AHB case study that has been used as a benchmark for
several reactive syn- thesis tools. Synthesizing AMBA AHB implementations that
can serve a large number of masters is still a difficult problem. We
demonstrate how to use parameterized synthesis in token rings to obtain an
implementation for a component that serves a single master, and can be arranged
in a ring of arbitrarily many components. We describe new tricks -- property
decompositional synthesis, and direct encoding of simple GR(1) -- that together
with previously described optimizations allowed us to synthesize the model with
14 states in 30 minutes.Comment: Moved to appendix some not very important proofs. To section
'optimizations: added the model for 0-process. Extended version of the paper
submitted to SYNT 201
Model Checking Paxos in Spin
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
Lost in Abstraction: Monotonicity in Multi-Threaded Programs (Extended Technical Report)
Monotonicity in concurrent systems stipulates that, in any global state,
extant system actions remain executable when new processes are added to the
state. This concept is not only natural and common in multi-threaded software,
but also useful: if every thread's memory is finite, monotonicity often
guarantees the decidability of safety property verification even when the
number of running threads is unknown. In this paper, we show that the act of
obtaining finite-data thread abstractions for model checking can be at odds
with monotonicity: Predicate-abstracting certain widely used monotone software
results in non-monotone multi-threaded Boolean programs - the monotonicity is
lost in the abstraction. As a result, well-established sound and complete
safety checking algorithms become inapplicable; in fact, safety checking turns
out to be undecidable for the obtained class of unbounded-thread Boolean
programs. We demonstrate how the abstract programs can be modified into
monotone ones, without affecting safety properties of the non-monotone
abstraction. This significantly improves earlier approaches of enforcing
monotonicity via overapproximations
Parameterized Synthesis
We study the synthesis problem for distributed architectures with a
parametric number of finite-state components. Parameterized specifications
arise naturally in a synthesis setting, but thus far it was unclear how to
detect realizability and how to perform synthesis in a parameterized setting.
Using a classical result from verification, we show that for a class of
specifications in indexed LTL\X, parameterized synthesis in token ring networks
is equivalent to distributed synthesis in a network consisting of a few copies
of a single process. Adapting a well-known result from distributed synthesis,
we show that the latter problem is undecidable. We describe a semi-decision
procedure for the parameterized synthesis problem in token rings, based on
bounded synthesis. We extend the approach to parameterized synthesis in
token-passing networks with arbitrary topologies, and show applicability on a
simple case study. Finally, we sketch a general framework for parameterized
synthesis based on cutoffs and other parameterized verification techniques.Comment: Extended version of TACAS 2012 paper, 29 page
Counter Attack on Byzantine Generals: Parameterized Model Checking of Fault-tolerant Distributed Algorithms
We introduce an automated parameterized verification method for
fault-tolerant distributed algorithms (FTDA). FTDAs are parameterized by both
the number of processes and the assumed maximum number of Byzantine faulty
processes. At the center of our technique is a parametric interval abstraction
(PIA) where the interval boundaries are arithmetic expressions over parameters.
Using PIA for both data abstraction and a new form of counter abstraction, we
reduce the parameterized problem to finite-state model checking. We demonstrate
the practical feasibility of our method by verifying several variants of the
well-known distributed algorithm by Srikanth and Toueg. Our semi-decision
procedures are complemented and motivated by an undecidability proof for FTDA
verification which holds even in the absence of interprocess communication. To
the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to achieve parameterized
automated verification of Byzantine FTDA
A Short Counterexample Property for Safety and Liveness Verification of Fault-tolerant Distributed Algorithms
Distributed algorithms have many mission-critical applications ranging from
embedded systems and replicated databases to cloud computing. Due to
asynchronous communication, process faults, or network failures, these
algorithms are difficult to design and verify. Many algorithms achieve fault
tolerance by using threshold guards that, for instance, ensure that a process
waits until it has received an acknowledgment from a majority of its peers.
Consequently, domain-specific languages for fault-tolerant distributed systems
offer language support for threshold guards.
We introduce an automated method for model checking of safety and liveness of
threshold-guarded distributed algorithms in systems where the number of
processes and the fraction of faulty processes are parameters. Our method is
based on a short counterexample property: if a distributed algorithm violates a
temporal specification (in a fragment of LTL), then there is a counterexample
whose length is bounded and independent of the parameters. We prove this
property by (i) characterizing executions depending on the structure of the
temporal formula, and (ii) using commutativity of transitions to accelerate and
shorten executions. We extended the ByMC toolset (Byzantine Model Checker) with
our technique, and verified liveness and safety of 10 prominent fault-tolerant
distributed algorithms, most of which were out of reach for existing
techniques.Comment: 16 pages, 11 pages appendi
A counter abstraction technique for the verification of robot swarms.
We study parameterised verification of robot swarms against temporal-epistemic specifications. We relax some of the significant restrictions assumed in the literature and present a counter abstraction approach that enable us to verify a potentially much smaller abstract model when checking a formula on a swarm of any size. We present an implementation and discuss experimental results obtained for the alpha algorithm for robot swarms
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