The Development of a TLA+ Verified Correctness Raft Consensus Protocol

Hua Guo, Yunhong Ji, Xuan Zhou

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Distributed consensus protocols require significant effort to design, develop, and verify correctly. Traditional software quality assurance methods rely on developers creating extensive test cases to cover all code branches, which depend heavily on human experience and prolonged testing. While formal methods offer a reliable means of designing correct protocols, they ensure correctness only at the design level. Ensuring implementation correctness remains challenging once it deviates from its original design. This paper introduces our development of a verified correctness Raft protocol using an innovative specification-driven approach. We first specified Raft using TLA+ and verified its correctness with a model checker. Subsequently, we implemented the protocol based on this verified specification. Finally, we employed model checker tools to automatically generate test cases covering the entire design space for implementation verification, ensuring the implementation is an exact specification refinement. This approach ensures the correctness of both the implementation and the design.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWeb and Big Data - 8th International Joint Conference, APWeb-WAIM 2024, Proceedings
EditorsWenjie Zhang, Zhengyi Yang, Xiaoyang Wang, Anthony Tung, Zhonglong Zheng, Hongjie Guo
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages459-469
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9789819772438
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event8th Asia-Pacific Web and Web-Age Information Management Joint International Conference on Web and Big Data, APWeb-WAIM 2024 - Jinhua, China
Duration: 30 Aug 20241 Sep 2024

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14965 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference8th Asia-Pacific Web and Web-Age Information Management Joint International Conference on Web and Big Data, APWeb-WAIM 2024
Country/TerritoryChina
CityJinhua
Period30/08/241/09/24

Keywords

  • Distributed System
  • Raft
  • TLA

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