共识协议的形式化验证研究现状与展望

分布式系统在计算环境中发挥重要的作用,其中的共识协议算法用于保证节点间行为的一致性.共识协议的设计错误可能导致系统运行故障,严重时可能对人员和环境造成灾难性的后果,因此保证共识协议设计的正确性非常重要.形式化验证能够严格证明设计模型中目标性质的正确性,适合用于验证共识协议.然而,随着分布式系统的规模增大,问题复杂度提升,使得分布式共识协议的形式化验证更为困难.采用什么方法对共识协议的设计进行形式化验证、如何提升验证规模,是共识协议形式化验证的重要研究问题.对目前采用形式化方法验证共识协议的研究工作进行调研,总结其中提出的重要建模方法和关键验证技术,并展望该领域未来有潜力的研究方向.

Formal Verification of Consensus Protocols: Survey and Perspective

Distributed systems play an important role in computing environments. Consensus protocols are employed to guarantee consistency among nodes. Design errors in the consensus protocols might cause failure in system operation and bring catastrophic consequences to humans and the environment. Therefore, it is important to prove the correctness of consensus protocols. Formal verification can strictly prove the correctness of target properties in designed models, which is suitable for verifying consensus protocols. However, the expanding scale of distributed systems results in more complicated issues and challenges to formal verification of consensus protocols. The method for formal verification of the consensus protocol design and increase in the verification scale are significant research issues in the formal verification of consensus protocols. This study investigates the current research on the employment of formal methods to verify consensus protocols, summarizes the key modeling methods and verification technologies, and proposes future research directions in this field.