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Towards Mechanised Consensus in Isabelle

Authors Elliot Jones, Diego Marmsoler

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Author Details

Elliot Jones
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, UK
Diego Marmsoler
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, UK

Funding

  • Marmsoler, Diego: This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/X027619/1].

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the FMBC 2024 reviewers for the careful reading and constructive suggestions on the paper and the formalisation.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Elliot Jones and Diego Marmsoler. Towards Mechanised Consensus in Isabelle. In 5th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains (FMBC 2024). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 118, pp. 4:1-4:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.FMBC.2024.4

Abstract

A blockchain acts as a universal ledger for digital transactions between two parties that require no moderation from a third party. Such transactions are cheaper, quicker, and more secure with high traceability and transparency, with the decentralised structure of a blockchain network allowing for greater scalability and availability. For these reasons, blockchain is at the forefront of emerging technologies, with a wide variety of industries investing billions into the technology. A blockchains consensus protocol is what allows a blockchain network to be decentralised but can be subject to malicious behaviour and faults in its design and implementation that can lead to catastrophic effects like the DAO hack that resulted in a loss of $60 million. From this it is clear to see that the verifications of these protocols are paramount to ensure the safe use of blockchain. In this research, we formally verify the Proof-of-Work consensus protocol, used by Bitcoin, in Isabelle/HOL by modelling the blockchain as the longest branch in a binary tree and proving that the common prefix property holds with the assumption that the network is in majority honest. In this paper, we discuss the validity of our approach, key functions and lemmas we used to complete the proof, advantages and drawbacks of the model, related work and how this research can be taken further.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Logic and verification
Keywords
  • Formal Methods
  • Blockchain
  • Isabelle/HOL
  • Consensus
  • Verification
  • Theorem Provers

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Supplementary Materials

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