Networcat: applying analysis techniques of shared memory software on message-passing distributed systems

Abstract Communication models are a key aspect in the design and implementation of distributed system architectures. Application logic must consider the guarantees of these models, which fundamentally influence its correctness. Modern multi-core processor architectures face a similar problem when it comes to accessing shared memory: the guarantees of an architecture have a fundamental impact on the observable behavior of software. The formalization of these guarantees in a declarative way has led to powerful tools and algorithms to define reusable constraints on patterns of memory access events and their relationships, enabling the efficient description and automatic formal analysis of software properties with respect to a specific architecture. The Cat memory modeling language provides a standard means of specifying these constraints. Despite the parallels, the axiomatic modeling and analysis of communication models in distributed systems remain a relatively unexplored area. In this paper, we address this gap and demonstrate how communication models can be mapped to the Cat language. We create a standard library of reusable patterns and demonstrate our approach, called NetworCat , on the simple examples of UDP and TCP, and we also present its applicability to the vastly configurable OMG-DDS service. This adaptation-based approach enables the use of ever-improving verification tools built for shared memory concurrency on distributed systems. We believe this not only benefits distributed system analyses by broadening the toolset for verification but also positively impacts the field of memory-model-aware verification by widening its audience to another domain.