Blogs (1) >>
POPL 2019
Sun 13 - Sat 19 January 2019 Cascais, Portugal
Sat 19 Jan 2019 11:40 - 12:05 at Sala VI - Contributed Talks 2 Chair(s): Enrico Tassi

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 Jan

Displayed time zone: Belfast change

11:15 - 12:30
Contributed Talks 2CoqPL at Sala VI
Chair(s): Enrico Tassi INRIA
11:15
25m
Talk
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
25m
Talk
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
25m
Talk
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