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Towards Verification of the Pastry Protocol Using TLA + 

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Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems (FMOODS 2011, FORTE 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6722))

Abstract

Pastry is an algorithm that provides a scalable distributed hash table over an underlying P2P network. Several implementations of Pastry are available and have been applied in practice, but no attempt has so far been made to formally describe the algorithm or to verify its properties. Since Pastry combines rather complex data structures, asynchronous communication, concurrency, resilience to churn and fault tolerance, it makes an interesting target for verification. We have modeled Pastry’s core routing algorithms and communication protocol in the specification language TLA + . In order to validate the model and to search for bugs we employed the TLA +  model checker tlc to analyze several qualitative properties. We obtained non-trivial insights in the behavior of Pastry through the model checking analysis. Furthermore, we started to verify Pastry using the very same model and the interactive theorem prover tlaps for TLA + . A first result is the reduction of global Pastry correctness properties to invariants of the underlying data structures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Tianxiang Lu & Christoph Weidenbach

  2. INRIA Nancy & LORIA, Nancy, France

    Tianxiang Lu & Stephan Merz

Authors
  1. Tianxiang Lu
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  2. Stephan Merz
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  3. Christoph Weidenbach
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 3, 56127, Pisa, Italy

    Roberto Bruni

  2. School of Computing, Queen’s University, 723 Goodwin Hall, K7L 3N6, Kingston, ON, Canada

    Juergen Dingel

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Lu, T., Merz, S., Weidenbach, C. (2011). Towards Verification of the Pastry Protocol Using TLA +  . In: Bruni, R., Dingel, J. (eds) Formal Techniques for Distributed Systems. FMOODS FORTE 2011 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6722. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21461-5_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21461-5_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21460-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21461-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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