Constructing Formal Rules to verify Message Communication in Distributed Systems

Abstract

This study presents a method to construct formal rules used to run-time verify message passing between clients in distributed systems. Rules construction is achieved in four steps: (1) Visual specification of expected behavior of the sender, receiver, and network in sending and receiving a message, (2) Extraction of properties of sender, receiver, and network from the visual specification, (3) specification of constraints that should govern message passing in distributed systems, and (4) construction of verifier rules from the properties and the constraints. The rules are used to verify actual sender, receiver, and network behavior. Expected behavior of the client (process) is one that to be and the actual one is the behavior should be verified. The rules were applied to verify the behavior of client and servers that communicated with each other in order to compute Fibonacci numbers in parallel and some violations were discovered.