TLC: temporal logic of distributed components

Abstract

Distributed systems are critical to reliable and scalable computing; however, they are complicated in nature and prone to bugs. To manage this complexity, network middleware has been traditionally built in layered stacks of components. We present a novel approach to compositional verification of distributed stacks to verify each component based on only the specification of lower components. We present TLC (Temporal Logic of Components), a novel temporal program logic that offers intuitive inference rules for verification of both safety and liveness properties of functional implementations of distributed components. To support compositional reasoning, we define a novel transformation on the assertion language that lowers the specification of a component to be used as a subcomponent. We prove the soundness of TLC and the lowering transformation with respect to a novel operational semantics for stacks of composed components in partially synchronous networks. We successfully apply TLC to compose and verify a stack of fundamental distributed components. CCS Concepts: • Theory of computation → Program analysis; • Software and its engineering → Distributed programming languages; Distributed systems organizing principles.

QuickSilver: modeling and parameterized verification for distributed agreement-based systems

“…Modular Verification with Abstract Modules. Disel and TLC [Griffin et al 2020] leverage the same observation we doÐthat distributed applications build on standard protocolsÐ and enable users to incorporate abstractions of such protocols to provide modular verification using the Coq theorem prover. The user is responsible for providing both the high-level descriptions of the underlying protocols as well as the inductive invariants needed to link protocols to their clients and/or enable horizontal composition with other protocols.…”

“…We note that existing verification efforts for agreement-based systems that go beyond core protocols [Hawblitzel et al 2015;Liu et al 2012;Padon et al 2016;v. Gleissenthall et al 2019], with the exception of [Griffin et al 2020;, do not leverage the availability of verified agreement artifacts through systematic agreement abstractions.…”

Distributed System Based on Software Components and Middleware Technology

“…In a related study, Griffin et al proposed a novel distributed stack composition verification Distributed Processing System method to verify each component based only on the specifications of the lower components [2]. The robustness of the temporal logic of components and the reduced transformation of operational semantics with respect to a distributed stack of components is demonstrated.…”