Safety Verification of Communicating One-Counter Machines

In order to verify protocols that tag messages with integer values, we investigate the decidability of the reachability problem for systems of communicating one-counter machines. These systems consist of local one-counter machines that asynchronously communicate by exchanging the value of their counters via, a priori unbounded, FIFO channels. This model extends communicating finite-state machines (CFSM) by infinite-state local processes and an infinite message alphabet. The main result of the paper is a complete characterization of the communication topologies that have a solvable reachability question. As already CFSM exclude the possibility of automatic verification in presence of mutual communication, we also consider an under-approximative approach to the reachability problem, based on rendezvous synchronization.