CAREER: Automated Analysis of Security and Fault-Tolerance of Distributed Systems

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9876058 Scott Stoller The proposed research focuses on the development of analysis methods and tools that increase the fault-tolerance and security of distributed software by helping programmers to debug, systematically test, and (when feasible) verify such software. Verification techniques based on state-space exploration apply directly only to finite-state systems. However, many distributed software systems have unbounded parameters (e.g., the number of client processes). The proposed research develops reductions that exploit partial independence between regions of the state space, so that verification of a finite-state system yields conclusions about the original unbounded system. Most state-space exploration tools force the user to construct and analyze simplified models of software. The proposed tool aims to analyze programs written in general-purpose languages, such as Java. The tool's basic design follows that of VeriSoft: state-space exploration is performed without storing the set of visited states, with optimizations to reduce the redundant computation (multiple visits to a state) that this may cause. The proposed research extends this approach to handle systems that use cryptography. Software used in undergraduate and graduate operating systems courses will be enhanced with the form of state-space exploration just described, providing students with powerful support for finding synchronization errors and other bugs.