Title:
Formally Verifying Implementations of Distributed Systems
Abstract:
Distributed systems are difficult to implement correctly because they must handle both concurrency and failures: machines may crash at arbitrary points and networks may reorder, drop, or duplicate packets. Further, their behavior is often too complex to permit exhaustive testing. In this talk, we’ll survey the Verdi project which provides a framework for implementing and formally verifying implementations of distributed systems in Coq. Verdi eases the verification burden by enabling developers to first verify their system under an idealized fault model, then transfer the resulting correctness guarantees to a more realistic fault model without any additional proof burden. Using this approach, the Verdi team produced the first correctness proof for an implementation of the Raft distributed consensus protocol.
Bio:
Zach Tatlock is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington where he leads the Programming Languages and Software Engineering (PLSE) group. He received his PhD from UC San Diego and BS from Purdue (where he took nearly every course with Bill Harris!). His research draws upon proof assistants, SMT solvers, and type systems to improve software reliability and security in domains ranging from distributed systems and compilers to web browsers. He can juggle and solve Rubik’s cubes, but not at the same time.