Skip to main content

Brief Announcement: Efficient Model Checking of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Protocols Using Symmetry Reduction

  • Conference paper
Distributed Computing (DISC 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5805))

Included in the following conference series:

  • 779 Accesses

Abstract

Motivation. Fault-tolerant (FT) distributed protocols represent fundamental building blocks behind many practical systems. A rigorous design of these protocols is desired given the complexity of manual proofs. The application of model checking (MC) [2] for protocol verification is attractive with its full automation and rich property language. However, being an exhaustive exploration method, its scalability is limited by the number of different system states. Although FT distributed protocols usually display a high degree of symmetry which stems from permuting different processes, MC efforts targeting their automated verification often disregard this symmetry. Therefore, we propose to leverage the framework of symmetry reduction [6] and improve on existing applications of it. Our secondary contribution is to define a high-level description language (called FTDP) to ease the symmetry-aware specification of FT distributed protocols.

Research supported in part by Microsoft Research, IBM Faculty Award.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bokor, P., Serafini, M., Suri, N., Veith, H.: Practical Symmetry Reduction of FT Distributed Protocols. TR-TUD-DEEDS-04-04-2009 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Clarke, E., Grumberg, O., Peled, D.: Model Checking. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Ip, C.N., Dill, D.L.: Better Verif. Through Symmetry. FMSD 9(1-2), 41–75 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Lamport, L.: The Part-Time Parliament. ACM TOCS 16(2), 133–169 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Lamport, L.: Checking a Multithreaded Alg. with +CAL. DISC, 151–163 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Miller, A., et al.: Symmetry in Temporal Logic MC. ACM C. Surv. 38(3), 8 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Bokor, P., Serafini, M., Suri, N., Veith, H. (2009). Brief Announcement: Efficient Model Checking of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Protocols Using Symmetry Reduction. In: Keidar, I. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5805. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04355-0_29

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04355-0_29

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04354-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04355-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics