Efficient model checking of networked applications

Abstract

Most applications today communicate with other processes over a network. Such applications are often multi-threaded. The non-determinism in the thread and communication schedules makes it desirable to model check such applications. When model checking such a networked application, a simple state space exploration scheme is not applicable, as the process being model checked would repeat communication operations when revisiting a given state after backtracking. We propose a solution that encapsulates such operations in a caching layer that is capable of hiding redundant communication operations from the environment. This approach is both more portable and more scalable than other approaches, as only a single process executes inside the model checker.