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Fighting livelock in the GNU i-protocol: a case study in explicit-state model checking

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Abstract

The i-protocol, an optimized sliding-window protocol for GNU uucp, first came to our attention in 1995 when we used the Concurrency Factory’s local model checker to detect, locate, and correct a non-trivial livelock in version 1.04 of the protocol. Since then, we have conducted a systematic case study on the protocol using four verification tools, viz. Cospan, Murϕ, Spin, and XMC, each of which supports some form of explicit-state model checking. Our results show that although the i-protocol is inherently complex – the size of its state space grows exponentially in the window size and it deploys several sophisticated optimizations aimed at minimizing control-message and retransmission overhead – it is nonetheless amenable to a number of general-purpose abstraction techniques whose application can significantly reduce the size of the protocol’s state space.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, SUNY at Stony Brook, NY 11794–4400, Stony Brook, USA

    Yifei Dong  & Scott A. Smolka

  2. Cadence Design Systems, 35 Spring Street, NJ 07974, New Providence, USA

    Xiaoqun Du

  3. Bell Laboratories, 600 Mountain Avenue, NJ 07974, Murray Hill, USA

    Gerard J. Holzmann

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  1. Yifei Dong
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  2. Xiaoqun Du
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  3. Gerard J. Holzmann
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  4. Scott A. Smolka
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Dong , Y., Du , X., Holzmann , G. et al. Fighting livelock in the GNU i-protocol: a case study in explicit-state model checking. STTT 4, 505–528 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-002-0092-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-002-0092-3

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