Brief Announcement: Efficient Model Checking of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Protocols Using Symmetry Reduction

Abstract

Motivation. Fault-tolerant (FT) distributed protocols represent fundamental building blocks behind many practical systems. A rigorous design of these protocols is desired given the complexity of manual proofs. The application of model checking (MC) [2] for protocol verification is attractive with its full automation and rich property language. However, being an exhaustive exploration method, its scalability is limited by the number of different system states. Although FT distributed protocols usually display a high degree of symmetry which stems from permuting different processes, MC efforts targeting their automated verification often disregard this symmetry. Therefore, we propose to leverage the framework of symmetry reduction [6] and improve on existing applications of it. Our secondary contribution is to define a high-level description language (called FTDP) to ease the symmetry-aware specification of FT distributed protocols.