Role-Based Symmetry Reduction of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Protocols with Language Support

Bokor, Péter; Serafini, Marco; Suri, Neeraj; Veith, Helmut

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-10373-5_8

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Crystalball is a tool to debug and prevent failures through a combination of real execution and model checking [33]. Other work utilizes symmetry reduction for scalable model checking of message-passing protocols [7]. These and similar techniques are orthogonal to ours and can be used in combination.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 97%

Efficient model checking of fault-tolerant distributed protocols

Bokor¹,

Kinder²,

Serafini

et al. 2011

2011 IEEE/IFIP 41st International Conference on Dependable Systems &Amp; Networks (DSN)

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To aid the formal verification of fault-tolerant distributed protocols, we propose an approach that significantly reduces the costs of their model checking. These protocols often specify atomic, process-local events that consume a set of messages, change the state of a process, and send zero or more messages. We call such events quorum transitions and leverage them to optimize state exploration in two ways. First, we generate fewer states compared to models where quorum transitions are expressed by single-message transitions. Second, we refine transitions into a set of equivalent, finer-grained transitions that allow partial-order algorithms to achieve better reduction. We implement the MP-Basset model checker, which supports refined quorum transitions. We model check protocols representing core primitives of deployed reliable distributed systems, namely: Paxos consensus, regular storage, and Byzantine-tolerant multicast. We achieve up to 92% memory and 85% time reduction compared to model checking with standard unrefined single-message transitions.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 97%

Efficient model checking of fault-tolerant distributed protocols

Bokor¹,

Kinder²,

Serafini

et al. 2011

2011 IEEE/IFIP 41st International Conference on Dependable Systems &Amp; Networks (DSN)

Self Cite

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“…Intuitively, most distributed systems are symmetric with respect to replicated processes, where replication may serve different goals such as fault-tolerance or enhanced performance. It has been shown that symmetry reduction can be extremely efficient in various practical applications of distributed systems [26], [6]. Unfortunately, symmetry reduction has not yet established itself as an efficient software verification technique.…”

Section: B Selective Hashingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Note that canonicalization is impossible using the unstructured serializer because the local state of a process is unknown to 3 Our implementation utilizes Basset's StringSetMatcher method. 4 There are efficient techniques to detect such symmetries [20], [6]. the serializer, as shown in the following example.…”

Section: B Selective Hashingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Verification of Distributed Protocols Using Stateful Model Checking

Saissi

Bokor

Müftüoğlu

et al. 2013

2013 IEEE 32nd International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems

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This paper presents efficient model checking of distributed software. Key to the achieved efficiency is a novel stateful model checking strategy that is based on the decomposition of states into a relevant and an auxiliary part. We formally show this strategy to be sound, complete, and terminating for general finite-state systems.As a case study, we implement the proposed strategy within Basset/MP-Basset, a model checker for message-passing Java programs. Our evaluation with actual deployed fault-tolerant message-passing protocols shows that the proposed stateful optimization is able to reduce model checking time and memory by up to 69% compared to the naive stateful search, and 39% compared to partial-order reduction. I. INTRODUCTIONSoftware model checking (MC) [14], [16] is a practical branch of verification for checking the actual implementation of the system. The wide usability comes at the price of low scalability as the model checking of even simple single-process programs can take several hours (or go off-scale) using stateof-the-art techniques [23].Verification complexity gets even worse for concurrent programs that run on loosely coupled processes. Our focus is on distributed protocols for various mission-critical (faulttolerant) applications where rigorous verification is desired. Example applications include atomic broadcast [21], storage [12], diagnosis [29], etc. Although the verification of faulttolerant distributed systems is known to be a hard problem due to concurrency and faults, MC has proven to be useful for debugging and verifying small instances of deployed protocols; recent approaches include MaceMC [22], CrystalBall [30], Modist [31], [18], Basset [25] and its extensions/optimizations [4], [5], [28].In MC, the possible executions of a system are modeled in terms of a state graph, where states (i.e., nodes) can be thought of as snapshots of the entire system (e.g., state of the servers, clients, communication channels) and transitions (i.e., edges) model any event that may alter the system's state (e.g., lines of code, function blocks). For MC to be scalable, the size of the graph must be feasible to manage, a challenge that is often referred to as the state explosion problem. An efficient and simple approach is stateful depth-first search [10], where the state graph is abstracted by 1) a sequence of states (called stack) that corresponds to the last run of the system, and 2) a set of states that have been explored during the model checking (called visited states).In this paper, we propose a general and sound approach to reduce the size of both the stack and the visited states for improved scalability of MC. Key to the proposed reduction is the

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“…We used the Murφ model checker [9] which supports symmetry reduction (SR) [8,13], a powerful optimization known to be very efficient for fault-tolerant (FT) distributed protocols [3]. We model checked some basic properties of the Paxos algorithm [10], a highly concurrent crash-tolerant consensus algorithm.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The presented general model also allows the modeling of process and communication faults [3]. For example, a Byzantine process is a regular process sending arbitrary messages or lossy channels can be modeled through auxiliary computation events deleting messages from channels.…”

Section: First Is Mp a General Model Ie Does The Restricted Compmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Efficient Models for Model Checking Message-Passing Distributed Protocols

Bokor

Serafini

Suri

2010

Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems

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Abstract. The complexity of distributed algorithms, such as state machine replication, motivates the use of formal methods to assist correctness verification. The design of the formal model of an algorithm directly affects the efficiency of the analysis. Therefore, it is desirable that this model does not add "unnecessary" complexity to the analysis. In this paper, we consider a general message-passing (MP) model of distributed algorithms and compare different ways of modeling the message traffic. We prove that the different MP models are equivalent with respect to the common properties of distributed algorithms. Therefore, one can select the model which is best suited for the applied verification technique. We consider MP models which differ regarding whether (1) the event of message delivery can be interleaved with other events and (2) a computation event must consume all messages that have been delivered after the last computation event of the same process. For generalized MP distributed protocols and especially focusing on fault-tolerance, we show that our proposed model (without interleaved delivery events and with relaxed semantics of computation events) is significantly more efficient for explicit state model checking. For example, the model size of the Paxos algorithm is 1/13 th that of existing equivalent MP models.

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Role-Based Symmetry Reduction of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Protocols with Language Support

Cited by 4 publications

References 19 publications

Efficient model checking of fault-tolerant distributed protocols

Efficient model checking of fault-tolerant distributed protocols

Efficient Verification of Distributed Protocols Using Stateful Model Checking

On Efficient Models for Model Checking Message-Passing Distributed Protocols

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