Model checking networked programs in the presence of transmission failures

Software model checkers work directly on single-process programs, but not on multiple processes. Conversion of processes into threads, combined with a network model, allows for model checking distributed applications, but does not cover potential communication failures. This paper contributes a fault model for model checking networked programs. If a naïve fault model is used, spurious deadlocks may appear, because certain processes are terminated before they can complete a necessary action. Such spurious deadlocks have to be suppressed, as implemented in our model checker extension. Our approach found several faults in existing applications, and scales well because exceptions generated by our tool can be checked individually.