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ByMC: Byzantine Model Checker

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Distributed Systems (ISoLA 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11246))

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Abstract

In recent work [10, 12], we have introduced a technique for automatic verification of threshold-guarded distributed algorithms that have the following features: (1) up to t of processes may crash or behave Byzantine; (2) the correct processes count messages and progress when they receive sufficiently many messages, e.g., at least \(t+1\); (3) the number n of processes in the system is a parameter, as well as t; (4) and the parameters are restricted by a resilience condition, e.g., \(n > 3t\).

In this paper, we present Byzantine Model Checker that implements the above-mentioned technique. It takes two kinds of inputs, namely, (i) threshold automata (the framework of our verification techniques) or (ii) Parametric Promela (which is similar to the way in which the distributed algorithms were described in the literature).

We introduce a parallel extension of the tool, which exploits the parallelism enabled by our technique on an MPI cluster. We compare performance of the original technique and of the extensions by verifying 10 benchmarks that model fault-tolerant distributed algorithms from the literature. For each benchmark algorithm we check two encodings: a manual encoding in threshold automata vs. a Promela encoding.

J. Widder—Supported by: the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) grant APALACHE (ICT15-103); and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through the National Research Network RiSE (S11403 and S11405), and project PRAVDA (P27722). The computational results presented have been achieved [in part] using the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Agreement, validity, and termination are typical properties of consensus [1, 16].

  2. 2.

    http://forsyte.at/software/bymc.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/konnov/fault-tolerant-benchmarks/tree/master/isola18.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our past and present collaborators Annu Gmeiner, Marijana Lazić, Ulrich Schmid, and Helmut Veith, who contributed to many of the described ideas that are now implemented in ByMC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lorraine, CNRS, Inria, LORIA, 54000, Nancy, France

    Igor Konnov

  2. TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), Vienna, Austria

    Josef Widder

Authors
  1. Igor Konnov
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  2. Josef Widder
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Correspondence to Igor Konnov .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Konnov, I., Widder, J. (2018). ByMC: Byzantine Model Checker. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Distributed Systems. ISoLA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11246. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03424-5_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03424-5_22

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