DissProve: Automated Verification of Distributed Protocols with Affine Communication

2026-06-22

AI Summary

This work addresses the state explosion problem inherent in asynchronous, parameterized distributed protocols, which arises from communication asynchrony and unbounded participant counts. The authors propose an automated safety verification method based on backward unreachableness analysis. Their key innovation lies in distinguishing parameterized unboundedness into affine and non-affine categories, focusing specifically on affine protocols. By integrating goal-directed instantiation, causal reasoning, and state summarization, the approach efficiently prunes the state space. The prototype tool DissProve successfully verifies multiple affine protocols featuring infinitely many participants and unbounded execution lengths, achieving—for the first time—scalable, fully automatic safety verification for such asynchronous parameterized systems.

Abstract

We consider the problem of automatically proving safety properties of distributed protocols. Distributed protocols have been particularly challenging for automated verification due to their asynchronous and parametric nature. Compared to synchronous systems, asynchronous communication leads to a combinatorial explosion of possible execution histories of message handlers. And because distributed protocols are typically defined parametrically on the number of actors, these definitions lead to an unbounded number of possible execution histories of unbounded length. Existing verification techniques for such distributed protocols typically require global invariants about the entire actor system, which are complex even for simple protocols. In this paper, we present an automated verification technique based on proving unreachability backwards from error states in an actor system. One key insight is that the unboundedness from parametricity can be further classified into \emph{affine} and non-affine protocols, where affine protocols have execution histories of unbounded length in a bounded number of communication rounds. We show how to use novel, goal-directed notions of materialization, causality, and summarization to verify safety properties of affine protocols with an unbounded number of actors in an automated manner. Using our prototype verification tool DissProve, we provide evidence for the feasibility of automated safety verification of asynchronous parametrized systems with affine communication.

Problem

• distributed protocols
• automated verification
• safety properties
• asynchronous systems
• parametric systems

Innovation

• affine communication
• automated verification
• distributed protocols
• backward reachability
• parametric systems