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On the Formal Verification of the Stellar Consensus Protocol

Authors Giuliano Losa, Mike Dodds

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Author Details

Giuliano Losa
  • Galois, Inc., Portland, Oregon, USA
Mike Dodds
  • Galois, Inc., Portland, Oregon, USA

Funding

This work was supported by the Stellar Development Foundation.

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Giuliano Losa and Mike Dodds. On the Formal Verification of the Stellar Consensus Protocol. In 2nd Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains (FMBC 2020). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 84, pp. 9:1-9:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.FMBC.2020.9

Abstract

The Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) is a quorum-based BFT consensus protocol. However, instead of using threshold-based quorums, SCP is permissionless and its quorum system emerges from participants’ self-declared trust relationships. In this paper, we describe the methodology we deploy to formally verify the safety and liveness of SCP for arbitrary but fixed configurations.
The proof uses a combination of Ivy and Isabelle/HOL. In Ivy, we model SCP in first-order logic, and we verify safety and liveness under eventual synchrony. In Isabelle/HOL, we prove the validity of our first-order encoding with respect to a more direct higher-order model. SCP is currently deployed in the Stellar Network, and we believe this is the first mechanized proof of both safety and liveness, specified in LTL, for a deployed BFT protocol.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Software verification
  • Networks → Protocol testing and verification
Keywords
  • Consensus
  • Blockchains
  • First-Order Logic
  • Stellar
  • Ivy Prover
  • Decidability

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References

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