Verifying Finality for Blockchain Systems
Blockchain systems such as Ethereum are increasingly used as financial transaction mechanisms (cryptocurrencies). However, in a blockchain system, there may be several competing chains of blocks (forks) that only agree on the transaction history up to some point, potentially leading to some transactions being dropped. To address the problem of blockchain revisions, Buterin and Griffith proposed a blockchain finality system overlay called Casper. When enough participants are honest, Casper defends both against active attacks and catastrophic crashes. In ongoing work, we are formally verifying Casper in Coq, both at the abstract protocol level and at the level of a distributed blockchain system. We build directly on two previous modeling and verification efforts: verified abstract models of Casper in Isabelle/HOL, and a model in Coq of a general distributed blockchain system called Toychain. Our verification approach bridges these two efforts by translating Isabelle/HOL definitions and proofs to Coq and specializing Toychain definitions for Casper. We give an overview of our ongoing verification effort and outline how we encode and prove key Casper properties, such as accountable safety, which rules out agreement on conflicting blocks when less than one third of participants behave adversarially.
Abstract (coqpl19-final11.pdf) | 460KiB |
Slides (coqpl-2019.pdf) | 367KiB |
Sat 19 JanDisplayed time zone: Belfast change
11:15 - 12:30 | |||
11:15 25mTalk | Towards Mechanising Probabilistic Properties of a Blockchain CoqPL Kiran Gopinathan University College London, Ilya Sergey Yale-NUS College and National University of Singapore File Attached | ||
11:40 25mTalk | Verifying Finality for Blockchain Systems CoqPL Karl Palmskog University of Texas at Austin, Milos Gligoric University of Texas at Austin, Lucas Peña University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Grigore Roşu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign File Attached | ||
12:05 25mTalk | WIP: Formalizing the Concordium Consensus Protocol in Coq CoqPL Thomas Dinsdale-Young , Bas Spitters Aarhus University, Søren Eller Thomsen Aarhus University, Daniel Tschudi Aarhus University File Attached |