Showing papers in "Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience in 1988"

An Automata-Theoretic Approach to Protocol Verification (Abstract)

Abstract: There are two major approaches to protocol verification. In the first approach, the reachability analysis approach, an exhaustive global state generation and exploration is performed. In the second approach, the program proving approach, the protocol is treated as a concurrent program and program verification tools are applied. The teachability analysis approach can easily be automated, but it usually is restricted to detection of very specific errors. The program proving approach can verify satisfaction of required service specifications, but its applicability to real life protocols is limited. We describe an automata-theoretic approach for general verification of protocols by teachability analysis. In this approach, the desired properties of the protocol, such as safety, liveness, precedence, etc., are specified in temporal logic, and the protocol is described as a finite statetransition graphs. The temporal-logic specification is then compiled into a finite-state Buchi automaton that accepts all correct computations. By combining this automaton with the statetransition graph of the protocol, we can reduce correctness with respect to any semantic property specified in temporal logic to detection of fair termination.