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Formal Verification of Blockchain Byzantine Fault Tolerance

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Handbook on Blockchain

Part of the book series: Springer Optimization and Its Applications ((SOIA,volume 194))

Abstract

To implement a blockchain, the trend is now to integrate a non-trivial Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm instead of the seminal idea of waiting to receive blocks to decide upon the longest branch. After a dozen years of existence, blockchains trade now large amounts of valuable assets and a simple disagreement could lead to disastrous losses. Unfortunately, Byzantine consensus solutions used in blockchains are at best proved correct “by hand” as we are not aware of any of them having been automatically verified. We propose two contributions: (i) we illustrate the severity of the problem by listing six vulnerabilities of blockchain consensus including two new counter-examples; (ii) we then formally verify two Byzantine fault-tolerant components of Red Belly Blockchain (Crain et al. in Red belly: a secure, fair and scalable open blockchain, 2021, [32]) using the ByMC model checker. First, we specify its simple broadcast primitive in 116 lines of code that is verified in 40 s on a 2-core Intel machine. Then, we specify its blockchain consensus algorithm in 276 lines of code and assume a round-rigid adversary to verify in 17 minutes on a 64-core AMD machine using MPI. To conclude, we argue that it has now become both possible and crucial to formally verify the correctness of blockchain consensus protocols.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://forum.poa.network/t/posdao-white-paper/2208.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/amiller/HoneyBadgerBFT/issues/59.

  3. 3.

    “Sufficiently many” processes stand for at least \(\lfloor \frac{2n}{3} \rfloor +1\) among n processes.

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Acknowledgements

Parts of the content of this chapter have been presented in the non-archiving workshops FRIDA’19 and ConsensusDays’21. We wish to thank Igor Konnov and Josef Widder for helping us understand the syntax and semantics of the threshold automata specification language and for confirming that ByMC verified the agreement1 property of our initial specification. We thank Tyler Crain, Achour Mostéfaoui, and Michel Raynal for discussions of the HoneyBadger counter-example, and Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, Maria Potop-Butucaru, and Sara Tucci for discussions on the Tendermint counter-example. This research is supported under Australian Research Council Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number 180104030) entitled “Taipan: A Blockchain with Democratic Consensus and Validated Contracts” and Australian Research Council Future Fellowship funding scheme (project number 180100496) entitled “The Red Belly Blockchain: A Scalable Blockchain for Internet of Things”.

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  1. Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Pierre Tholoniat

  2. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Vincent Gramoli

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  1. Pierre Tholoniat
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA

    Duc A. Tran

  2. Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    My T. Thai

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Bhaskar Krishnamachari

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Tholoniat, P., Gramoli, V. (2022). Formal Verification of Blockchain Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In: Tran, D.A., Thai, M.T., Krishnamachari, B. (eds) Handbook on Blockchain. Springer Optimization and Its Applications, vol 194. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07535-3_12

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