Automated formal verification of protocols

Abstract

We adopt a formalism to describe protocols that is close to the human way of thinking and can be easily used to perform reachability analysis of the described protocol in a state-transition format. This formalism allows for an execution tree (ET) to be generated from a set of assertions such that all paths from the root to the leaves are well-defined formulas. We then extend the formalism with regards to real-time properties. Finally, we present a software verification tool, Verify, that implements the above features in the analysis of protocols.