Verification of Multi-Agent Properties in Electronic Voting: A Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents a combination of advanced verification techniques to effectively verify complex, real-world multi-agent systems like electronic voting protocols, overcoming previous limitations in scalability and complexity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of verification methods, including fixpoint approximation and partial order reduction, to improve the verification of heterogeneous, scalable models.

Findings

Enabled verification of more sophisticated models than before

Demonstrated effectiveness on the Selene e-voting protocol

Achieved scalable verification through combined techniques

Abstract

Formal verification of multi-agent systems is hard, both theoretically and in practice. In particular, studies that use a single verification technique typically show limited efficiency, and allow to verify only toy examples. Here, we propose some new techniques and combine them with several recently developed ones to see what progress can be achieved for a real-life scenario. Namely, we use fixpoint approximation, domination-based strategy search, partial order reduction, and parallelization to verify heterogeneous scalable models of the Selene e-voting protocol. The experimental results show that the combination allows to verify requirements for much more sophisticated models than previously.