Reasoning about Block-based Cloud Storage Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a verification framework using separation logic to prove the correctness and reliability of block-based cloud storage systems, addressing their complexity and ensuring trustworthy management programs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-tier heap structure, a modeling language, and Hoare-style specifications for verifying BCSSs, which is a new approach in this domain.

Findings

The framework effectively verifies BCSS correctness.

The separation logic assertions accurately describe BCSS properties.

The specifications are sound for reasoning about BCSSs.

Abstract

Owing to the massive growth in the storage demands of big data, Cloud Storage Systems (CSSs) have been put forward to improve the storage capacity. Compared with traditional storage systems, CSSs have lots of advantages, such as higher capacity, lower cost, and easier scalability. But they are also with higher complexity. In order to ensure CSSs to be reliable, it is necessary to prove the correctness of CSSs management programs. In fact, we are going to verify Block-based Cloud Storage Systems (BCSSs), since BCSSs are the most popular CSSs. In this paper, the correctness of management programs in BCSSs have been proven, and a verification framework based on separation logic is proposed to finish the proven process. The main contributions are as follows. (1) A novel framework with two-tier heap structure is constructed to reflect the characteristics of BCSSs, and a modeling language is defined based on it. (2) Assertions based on separation logic is constructed to describe the properties of BCSSs. (3) The Hoare-style specifications are proposed to reason about the BCSSs. The results demonstrate that the correctness and reliability of BCSSs can be verified by the above proposed methods. Furthermore, the proposed specifications is sound in the application of reasoning about BCSSs.