Formal Verfication of a Protocol for Communications over Faulty Channels

This paper describes the formalization and the verification of a communication protocol over faulty channels, using the Larch prover LP. The chosen specification environment is UNITY, since the proposed model can be fruitfully applied to a wide variety of problems and modified or extended for special purposes. It provides a higher level of abstraction to express solutions to parallel programming problems. We show how the UNITY specifications can be mechanized in LP, how we can use the theorem proving methodology to prove safety and liveness of a communication protocol, and that a theorem prover can be actually used to detect flaws in a system specification.