Abstract
Distributed systems are notoriously difficult to design and implement correctly. Formal verification provides correctness proofs, and has recently been successfully applied to various distributed systems. At the heart of a typical formal verification is a computer-checked proof with an inductive invariant. Finding this inductive invariant is the hardest part of the proof: a part that is currently undertaken manually by the developer and is responsible for most of the effort associated with formal verification. In this paper, we present a new approach: Incremental Inference of Inductive Invariants (I4), to automatically generate inductive invariants for distributed protocols. We start from a simple idea: the inductive invariant of a finite instance of the protocol must be an instance of a general inductive invariant for the infinite distributed protocol. In I4, we instantiate a finite instance of the protocol, work out the finite inductive invariant of this instance, then figure out the general inductive invariant as a generalization of the finite invariant. Our experiments show that I4 can finish the general proof of correctness of several systems with minimal human effort.
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