Liveness reasoning with Isabelle/HOL

Abstract

This paper describes an extension of Paulson's inductive protocol verification approach for liveness reasoning. The extension requires no change of the system model underlying the original inductive approach. Therefore, all the advantages, which makes Paulson's approach successful for safety reasoning are kept, while liveness reasoning becomes possible. To simplify liveness reasoning, a new fairness notion, named Parametric Fairness is used instead of the standard ones. A probabilistic model is established to support this new fairness notion. Experiments with small examples as well as real world communication protocols confirm the practicality of the extension. All the work has been formalized with Isabelle/HOL using Isar. © 2009 Springer.