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Holistic Verification of Blockchain Consensus

Authors Nathalie Bertrand , Vincent Gramoli , Igor Konnov , Marijana Lazić , Pierre Tholoniat , Josef Widder

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Author Details

Nathalie Bertrand
  • INRIA Rennes, France
Vincent Gramoli
  • University of Sydney, Australia
  • Redbelly Network, Sydney, Australia
Igor Konnov
  • Informal Systems, Wien, Austria
Marijana Lazić
  • TU München, Germany
Pierre Tholoniat
  • Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Josef Widder
  • Informal Systems, Wien, Austria

Funding

This research is supported under Australian Research Council Future Fellowship funding scheme (project number 180100496) entitled "The Red Belly Blockchain: A Scalable Blockchain for Internet of Things", Interchain Foundation (Switzerland), and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 787367 (PaVeS).

Cite As Get BibTex

Nathalie Bertrand, Vincent Gramoli, Igor Konnov, Marijana Lazić, Pierre Tholoniat, and Josef Widder. Holistic Verification of Blockchain Consensus. In 36th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 246, pp. 10:1-10:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2022.10

Abstract

Blockchain has recently attracted the attention of the industry due, in part, to its ability to automate asset transfers. It requires distributed participants to reach a consensus on a block despite the presence of malicious (a.k.a. Byzantine) participants. Malicious participants exploit regularly weaknesses of these blockchain consensus algorithms, with sometimes devastating consequences. In fact, these weaknesses are quite common and are well illustrated by the flaws in various blockchain consensus algorithms [Pierre Tholoniat and Vincent Gramoli, 2019]. Paradoxically, until now, no blockchain consensus has been holistically verified. 
In this paper, we remedy this paradox by model checking for the first time a blockchain consensus used in industry. We propose a holistic approach to verify the consensus algorithm of the Red Belly Blockchain [Tyler Crain et al., 2021], for any number n of processes and any number f < n/3 of Byzantine processes. We decompose directly the algorithm pseudocode in two parts - an inner broadcast algorithm and an outer decision algorithm - each modelled as a threshold automaton [Igor Konnov et al., 2017], and we formalize their expected properties in linear-time temporal logic. We then automatically check the inner broadcasting algorithm, under a carefully identified fairness assumption. For the verification of the outer algorithm, we simplify the model of the inner algorithm by relying on its proven properties. Doing so, we formally verify, for any parameter, not only the safety properties of the Red Belly Blockchain consensus but also its liveness in less than 70 seconds.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computing methodologies → Distributed algorithms
  • Theory of computation → Logic and verification
Keywords
  • Model checking
  • automata
  • logic
  • byzantine failure

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