Regularity and quantification: a new approach to verify distributed protocols

Proving that an unbounded distributed protocol satisfies a given safety property amounts to finding a quantified inductive invariant that implies the property for all possible instance sizes of the protocol. Existing methods for solving this problem can be described as search procedures for an invariant whose quantification prefix fits a particular template. We propose an alternative constructive approach that does not prescribe, a priori, a specific quantifier prefix. Instead, the required prefix is automatically inferred without any enumerative search by carefully analyzing the spatial and temporal regularity of the protocol. The key insight underlying this approach is that structural regularity and quantification are closely related concepts that express protocol invariance under different re-arrangements of its components and its unbounded evolution over time. We extended the finite-domain IC3/PDR algorithm to use these regularities and boost clause learning to automatically derive the required quantified inductive invariant by exploiting the connection between structural regularities and quantification. We also describe a procedure to automatically find a minimal finite size, the cutoff , that yields a quantified invariant proving safety for any size. Our approach is implemented in IC3PO, a new verifier for distributed protocols that significantly outperforms the state of the art, scales orders of magnitude faster, and robustly derives compact inductive invariants fully automatically.