# Certifying Safety when Implementing Consensus

## TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient protocol for certifying the safety of consensus implementations in distributed systems, capable of handling fail-stop failures and potentially generalizable to other protocols.

## Contribution

It presents a novel, efficient certification protocol for consensus safety that operates correctly under fail-stop failures and discusses its potential generalizations.

## Key findings

- Protocol is efficient in message count and size
- Operates correctly with up to n-1 node failures
- Potential for generalization to other protocols

## Abstract

Ensuring the correctness of distributed system implementations remains a challenging and largely unaddressed problem. In this paper we present a protocol that can be used to certify the safety of consensus implementations. Our proposed protocol is efficient both in terms of the number of additional messages sent and their size, and is designed to operate correctly in the presence of $n-1$ nodes failing in an $n$ node distributed system (assuming fail-stop failures). We also comment on how our construction might be generalized to certify other protocols and invariants.