Distributed System Contract Monitoring

TL;DR

This paper introduces mDPi, a location-aware process calculus for formal reasoning about runtime contract monitoring in distributed systems, addressing challenges like information leaks and communication overheads.

Contribution

It presents a novel calculus and formal framework for analyzing and synthesizing distributed system contracts into monitors, enhancing understanding of monitoring strategies.

Findings

Formal semantics for distributed monitoring strategies

Ability to synthesize contracts into monitors using mDPi

Framework supports reasoning about information leaks and load balancing

Abstract

The use of behavioural contracts, to specify, regulate and verify systems, is particularly relevant to runtime monitoring of distributed systems. System distribution poses major challenges to contract monitoring, from monitoring-induced information leaks to computation load balancing, communication overheads and fault-tolerance. We present mDPi, a location-aware process calculus, for reasoning about monitoring of distributed systems. We define a family of Labelled Transition Systems for this calculus, which allow formal reasoning about different monitoring strategies at different levels of abstractions. We also illustrate the expressivity of the calculus by showing how contracts in a simple contract language can be synthesised into different mDPi monitors.