Verification of NBS Class 4 Transport Protocol

This paper discusses the verification of the connection management aspects of a transport layer protocol available from the National Bureau of Standards. An automated protocol development technique is used to verify a subset of the protocol with respect to the protocol properties of completeness, deadlock freeness, boundedness, and termination. The analysis points out several error situations in which the completeness property does not hold for the protocol. We first give an overview of the protocol development technique used in specification and verification of the protocol. We then describe the transport layer protocol, and present the results obtained by applying the automated verification technique to this protocol.