Loupe: Verifying Publish-Subscribe Architectures with a Magnifying Lens

Abstract

Abstract-The Publish-Subscribe (P/S) communication paradigm fosters high decoupling among distributed components. This facilitates the design of dynamic applications, but also impacts negatively on their verification, making it difficult to reason on the overall federation of components. In addition, existing P/S infrastructures offer radically different features to the applications, e.g., in terms of message reliability. This further complicates the verification, as its outcome depends on the specific guarantees provided by the underlying P/S system. Although model checking has been proposed as a tool for the verification of P/S architectures, existing solutions overlook many characteristics of the underlying communication infrastructure to avoid state explosion problems.To overcome these limitations, the Loupe domain-specific model checker adopts a different approach. The P/S infrastructure is not modeled on top of a general-purpose model checker. Instead, it is embedded within the checking engine, and the traditional P/S operations become part of the modeling language. In this article, we describe Loupe's design and the dedicated state abstractions that enable accurate verification without incurring in state explosion problems. We also illustrate our use of state-ofthe-art software verification tools to assess some key functionality in Loupe's current implementation. A complete case study shows how Loupe eases the verification of P/S architectures. Finally, we quantitatively compare Loupe's performance against alternative approaches. The results indicate that Loupe is effective and efficient in enabling accurate verification of P/S architectures.

Using formal verification to evaluate theexecution time of Spark applications

“…Domain-specific optimizations have been already adopted in the past to complement low-level optimization techniques. For instance, [BGM11] successfully applied optimization of models to improve the performance of the verification of distributed applications that implement a Publish/Subscribe communication paradigm.…”

Hierarchical timed automata based verification of dynamic evolution process in open environments

“…However, the consistency is only partially achieved by the type compatibility. The works on model-based analysis and verification include [2,4,6,15]. In [2], Baresi et al.…”

“…The works on model-based analysis and verification include [2,4,6,15]. In [2], Baresi et al. studies the domain-specific features of publish-subscribe style-compliant software architectural styles and proposed customized state-generation algorithms which effectively reduced the state space.…”

Detecting problematic message sequences and frequencies in distributed systems

“…More specifically in the context of publish/subscribe systems, Michlmayr et al [18,19] created a framework to facilitate the generation of test oracles based on linear temporal logic properties imposed on the system. Baresi et al [2,3] also developed a framework for verifying specific properties of publish/subscribe systems through the introduction of richer primitives into model checkers to bring them closer to the necessities of these systems.…”