Abstract
The Raft consensus algorithm is widely recognized for its practicality and comprehensibility in achieving consensus within distributed systems. This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of Raft, making clear key concepts and verifying critical properties. We delve into the fundamental components of Raft, encompassing leader election, log replication, and safety guarantees. Detailed explanations are shown in order to illustrate the interactions between actors during commit phases, leader selection, and other significant stages. The Athena proof system is employed to verify essential properties such as leader completeness, log consistency, and fault tolerance, ensuring the algorithm’s resilience in the face of failures. Drawing upon the Athena programming language’s actor model implementation, we simulate and validate the behavior of Raft, providing practical insights into its functionality.
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Notes
- 1.
The full implementation of our work is available at: undisclosedtokeepanonymity.
- 2.
Athena’s assumption base works as the set of premises held to be true, Athena’s system ensures that a sentence is added to the assumption base if and only if it is sound with the current theory.
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Sanabria, M., Angel, L., Cardozo, N. (2024). Safety Verification of the Raft Leader Election Algorithm Using Athena. In: Tabares, M., Vallejo, P., Suarez, B., Suarez, M., Ruiz, O., Aguilar, J. (eds) Advances in Computing. CCC 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1924. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47372-2_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47372-2_23
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