Toward automated abstraction for protocols on branching networks

Abstract

We have used various manual abstraction techniques to formally verify a transaction ordering property for an IO protocol over bus/bridge networks. In the context of network protocol verification, an abstraction is needed to reduce the unbounded number of network configurations to a small number of representative networks that can be checked using algorithmic methods. The manually derived abstraction was both brittle and difficult to validate. In this report, we discuss the need for abstraction techniques in the formal verification of protocols over networks and present our recent efforts to create an automatic abstraction technique for network protocols using predicate abstraction as a starting point.