Verifying an Interactive Consistency Circuit: A Case Study in the Reuse of a Verification Technology

This talk presented the work done at ORA for NASA-LRC in the design and formal verification of a hardware implementation of a scheme for attaining interactive consistency (byzantine agreement) among four microprocessors. The microprocessors used in the design are an updated version of a formally verified 32-bit, instruction-pipelined, RISC processor, MiniCayuga. The 4-processor system, which is designed under the assumption that the clocks of all the processors are synchronized, provides ''software control'' over the interactive consistency operation. Interactive consistency computation is supported as an explicit instruction on each of the microprocessors. An identical user program executing on each of the processors decides when and on what data interactive consistency must be performed.

This exercise also served as a case study to investigate the effectiveness of reusing the technology which had been developed during the MiniCayuga effort for verifying synchronous hardware designs. MiniCayuga was verified using the verification system Clio which was also developed at ORA. To assist in reusing this technology a computer-aided specification and verification tool was developed. This tool specializes Clio to synchronous hardware designs and significantly reduces the tedium involved in verifying such designs. The talk presented the tool and described how it was used to specify and verify the interactive consistency circuit.