An algorithmic technique for protocol verification

Abstract

An algorithmic procedure for protocol verification is presented. A protocol is described as a collection of processes interacting with one another using CSP-type input/output operations. The safety properties of each process are described by a finite-state machine and the liveliness properties of each process by a collection of temporal logic formulas. The required behavior of the protocol is then specified in the same formalism, and the verification procedure can check the description of the protocol for correctness. An experimental implementation of the verification algorithm has been applied to the alternating-bit protocol. >