Summary: Verifying Network Protocol Implementations by
Symbolic Refinement Checking
Rajeev Alur and Bow­Yaw Wang
Department of Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
[alur,bywang] @ cis.upenn.edu
www.cis.upenn.edu/~[alur,bywang]
Abstract. We consider the problem of establishing consistency of code
implementing a network protocol with respect to the documentation as
a standard RFC. The problem is formulated as a refinement checking
between two models, the implementation extracted from code and the
specification extracted from RFC. After simplifications based on assume­
guarantee reasoning, and automatic construction of witness modules to
deal with the hidden specification state, the refinement checking prob­
lem reduces to checking transition invariants. The methodology is illus­
trated on two case­studies involving popular network protocols, namely,
PPP (point­to­point protocol for establishing connections remotely) and
DHCP (dynamic­host­configuration­protocol for configuration manage­
ment in mobile networks). We also present a symbolic implementation
of a reduction scheme based on compressing internal transitions in a hi­

Source: Alur, Rajeev - Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania
Wang, Bow-Yaw - Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica (Taiwan)

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences