Systematic verification of safety properties of arbitrary network protocol compositions using CHAIN

Abstract

Formal correctness of complex multi-party protocols can be difficult to verify. While models of specific sign constraints, protocols which lend themselves to arbitrarily many compositions of agents -such as the chaining of proxies or the peering of routers- are more difficult to verify because they represent potentially infinite state spaces and may exhibit emergent behaviors which may not materialize under particular fixed compositions. We address this challenge by developing an algebraic approach that enables us to reduce arbitrary compositions of network agents into a behaviorally-equivalent (with respect to some correctness property) compact, conical representation, which is amenable to mechanical verification. Our approach consists of an algebra and a set of property-preserving rewrite rules for the canonical homomorphic abstraction of infinite network protocol composition (CHAIN). Using CHAIN, an expression over our algebra (i.e., a set of configurations of network protocol agents) can be reduced to another behaviorally-equivalent expression (i.e., a smaller set of configurations). Repeated applications of such rewrite rules produce a canonical expression which can be checked mechanically. We demonstrate our approach by characterizing deadlock-prone configurations of HTTP agents, as well as establishing useful properties of an overlay protocol for scheduling MPEG frames, and of a protocol for Web intracache consistency.