Aneris: A Mechanised Logic for Modular Reasoning about Distributed Systems

Building network-connected programs and distributed systems is a powerful way to provide scalability and availability in a digital, always-connected era. However, with great power comes great complexity. Reasoning about distributed systems is well-known to be difficult. In this paper we present Aneris, a novel framework based on separation logic supporting modular, node-local reasoning about concurrent and distributed systems. The logic is higher-order, concurrent, with higher-order store and network sockets, and is fully mechanized in the Coq proof assistant. We use our framework to verify an implementation of a load balancer that uses multi-threading to distribute load amongst multiple servers and an implementation of the two-phase-commit protocol with a replicated logging service as a client. The two examples certify that Aneris is well-suited for both horizontal and vertical modular reasoning.