Guard Automata for the Verification of Safety and Liveness of Distributed Algorithms (long version)

Distributed algorithms typically run over arbitrary many processes and may involve unboundedly many rounds, making the automated verification of their correctness challenging. Building on domain theory, we introduce a framework that abstracts infinite-state distributed systems that represent distributed algorithms into finite-state guard automata. The soundness of the approach corresponds to the Scott-continuity of the abstraction, which relies on the assumption that the distributed algorithms are layered. Guard automata thus enable the verification of safety and liveness properties of distributed algorithms