Complexity issues in automated synthesis of failsafe fault-tolerance

We focus on the problem of synthesizing failsafe fault-tolerance where fault-tolerance is added to an existing (fault-intolerant) program. A failsafe fault-tolerant program satisfies its specification (including safety and liveness) in the absence of faults. However, in the presence of faults, it sa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing Vol. 2; no. 3; pp. 201 - 215
Main Authors: Kulkarni, S.S., Ebnenasir, A.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Washington IEEE 01.07.2005
IEEE Computer Society
Subjects:
Agreements
Algorithm design and analysis
Algorithms
Analysis
automatic addition of fault-tolerance
Automation
Computer programming
Design
Design methodology
distributed programs
Fault diagnosis
Fault tolerance
Fault tolerant systems
formal methods
Heuristic
Index Terms- Fault-tolerance
Manuals
Polynomials
program synthesis
Safety
State-space methods
Studies
ISSN:1545-5971, 1941-0018
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We focus on the problem of synthesizing failsafe fault-tolerance where fault-tolerance is added to an existing (fault-intolerant) program. A failsafe fault-tolerant program satisfies its specification (including safety and liveness) in the absence of faults. However, in the presence of faults, it satisfies its safety specification. We present a somewhat unexpected result that, in general, the problem of synthesizing failsafe fault-tolerant distributed programs from their fault-intolerant version is NP-complete in the state space of the program. We also identify a class of specifications, monotonic specifications, and a class of programs, monotonic programs, for which the synthesis of failsafe fault-tolerance can be done in polynomial time (in program state space). As an illustration, we show that the monotonicity restrictions are met for commonly encountered problems, such as Byzantine agreement, distributed consensus, and atomic commitment. Furthermore, we evaluate the role of these restrictions in the complexity of synthesizing failsafe fault-tolerance. Specifically, we prove that if only one of these conditions is satisfied, the synthesis of failsafe fault-tolerance is still NP-complete. Finally, we demonstrate the application of monotonicity property in enhancing the fault-tolerance of (distributed) nonmasking fault-tolerant programs to masking.
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ISSN:1545-5971
1941-0018
DOI:10.1109/TDSC.2005.29