Distributed CTL Model Checking in the Cloud

Abstract: The recent extensive availability of "big data" platforms calls for a more widespread adoption by the formal verification community. In fact, formal verification requires high performance data processing software for extracting knowledge from the unprecedented amount of data which come from analyzed systems. Since cloud based computing resources have became easily accessible, there is an opportunity for verification techniques and tools to undergo a deep technological transition to exploit the new available architectures. This has created an increasing interest in parallelizing and distributing verification techniques. In this paper we introduce a distributed approach which exploits techniques typically used by the "big data" community to enable verification of Computation Tree Logic (CTL) formulas on very large state spaces using distributed systems and cloud computing facilities. The outcome of several tests performed on benchmark specifications are presented, thus showing the convenience of the proposed approach.