Formalizing and Verifying Decentralized Systems with Extended Concurrent Separation Logic

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extended concurrent separation logic tailored for formalizing and verifying decentralized systems, enhancing modularity and expressiveness to improve security and correctness assurance.

Contribution

It presents a novel extension to standard concurrent separation logic with features like communication encapsulation and node-level reasoning for decentralized system verification.

Findings

Successfully formalized consensus mechanisms.

Verified correctness of smart contracts.

Enhanced modularity and expressiveness of the logic.

Abstract

Decentralized techniques are becoming crucial and ubiquitous with the rapid advancement of distributed ledger technologies such as the blockchain. Numerous decentralized systems have been developed to address security and privacy issues with great dependability and reliability via these techniques. Meanwhile, formalization and verification of the decentralized systems is the key to ensuring correctness of the design and security properties of the implementation. In this paper, we propose a novel method of formalizing and verifying decentralized systems with a kind of extended concurrent separation logic. Our logic extends the standard concurrent separation logic with new features including communication encapsulation, environment perception, and node-level reasoning, which enhances modularity and expressiveness. Besides, we develop our logic with unitarity and compatibility to facilitate implementation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our method by applying our logic to formalize and verify critical techniques in decentralized systems including the consensus mechanism and the smart contract.