Abstract. The General Inter-Orb Protocol (GIOP) is a key component of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specification. We present the formal modeling and validation of the GIOP protocol using the Promela language, Linear Time Temporal Logic (LTL) and the Spin model checker. We validate the Promela model using ten high-level requirements which we elicit from the informal CORBA specification. These requirements are then formalized in LTL and the Spin model checker is used to determine their validity. During the validation process we discovered a few problems in GIOP: a potential transport-layer interface deadlock and problems with the server migration protocol. We also describe how property specification patterns helped us in formalizing the high-level requirements that we have elicited.
We describe the Visual Interface to Promela (VIP) tool that we have recently implemented. VIP supports the visual editing and maintenance of v-Promela models. v-Promela is a visual, object-oriented extension to Promela, the input language to the Spin model checker. We introduce the v-Promela notation as supported by the VIP editor, discuss Promela code generation, and describe the process of property validation for the resulting models. Our discussion centers around two case studies, a call processing system and the CORBA GIOP protocol.
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