An ASTRAL specification has only finite process instances and each process instance has finite transitions. The initial statement of a process and the exit assertion of transitions may involve unbounded nondeterminism. For example, in modeling nonce generation of a security protocol like Needham-Schroeder's , we use the following transition in process ProcessInitiator:
TRANSITION Initiate ( j: RESP_INTR_ID ) ENTRY [TIME:1] state = idle EXIT state = init & nonce_a = nonce_a & to = j & from = self & pkey = PublicKey ( j ) & source = self & kind = Msg_Type_1
which among other things prepares a nonce_a for initiating the protocol. The EXIT assertion says after firing the transition with duration 1, nonce_a could be any fixed value from its domain as declared which certainly satisfies nonce_a=nonce_a. Hence the nondeterministic choices of nonce_a's value are unbounded provided it is of type integer.
The expressibility of ASTRAL formulas shown as invariant statements etc., is the same as PA (Peano Arithmetic), therefore the validity of ASTRAL formula is undecidable. This adds extra difficulties in handling the unbounded nondeterminism. In our model checker, we restrict the ASTRAL formula to the following generalized form (or equivalent):
(Q is if n is odd and is otherwise.) where I is an arithmetic expression and are either explicitly bounded or their bounds can be resolved by context. is composed of local variables or exported variables from other process instances. Without loss of generality, assume are exactly those variables which can not be resolved to deterministic value (otherwise we just hide them away). Furthermore, we restrict an Exit assertion to the following form:
The atomic assertion A in the formula above is defined by,
A=X|C|A+A|A-A
where
C=P.X|n|X'
In the formula above, C holds all deterministic values including exported variables P.X from another process P, constant expression n , and X' (the value that holds for X before starting the transition). All the other variables are supposed to be changed after the transition. Without loss of generality, let stand for any Exit assertion as above. Define the Boolean structure as follows:
where is a Boolean variable indexed by A . Let denote all Boolean variables in and define , an assignment of according to , as .
Example.
EXIT ((X=Y+1) or (Y=Z)) & X>Z
whose Boolean structure is
For , the will be .
Say if and .
Denote to be the solution space of with .
Define to be a partition of S(E) :
(1). ,
(2). .
THEOREM. is finite.
Let S(F) be the solution space of F .
THEOREM. is undecidable.
Based upon these theorems, the best thing we can do with the model checker is to check F by guessing the solution as follows:
Let be samples chosen from . Check F with these respectively. F may be satisfied by these values but it may fail with other possible values. Because of the undecidability, in general we can't detect this failure. Hence by this algorithm, each transition branches into finite successors.