Brief Announcement: Holistic Verification of Blockchain Consensus

BSTRACTToday, the market capitalization of the seminal blockchain, Bitcoin, is about $803B which incentivizes malicious participants to find problematic executions that would allow them to steal financial assets. As the blockchain requires a distributed set of machines to agree on a unique block of transactions to be appended to the chain, attackers naturally try to exploit consensus vulnerabilities to double spend. As a result, formally verifying that a blockchain consensus protocol is safe and live is key to mitigate financial losses. Recent progress in mechanical proofs represent the first steps towards verifying blockchain consensus. The parameterized model checking of threshold automata (TAs) has recently proved instrumental in verifying fully asynchronous parts of consensus algorithms, like broadcast algorithms [4]. The aforementioned reduction technique cannot apply to partial synchrony: moving the message reception step to a later point in the execution might violate an assumed message delay.