TRAC: a tool for data-aware coordination (with an application to smart contracts)

TL;DR

TRAC is a verification tool for data-aware coordination in distributed systems, especially smart contracts, using FSMs with data and participant modeling, ensuring well-formed specifications and analyzing performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel FSM-based specification and verification approach for unbounded, data-aware distributed coordination, with a focus on smart contracts.

Findings

Successfully verified smart contract scenarios

Demonstrated modeling of unbounded participants

Analyzed performance and decision times

Abstract

We propose TRAC, a tool for the specification and verification of coordinated multiparty distributed systems. Relying on finite-state machines (FSMs) where transition labels look like Hoare triples, \thetool can specify the coordination of the participants of a distributed protocol for instance an execution model akin blockchain smart contracts (SCs). In fact, the transitions of our FSMs yield guards, and assignments over data variables, and with participants binders. The latter allow us to model scenarios with an unbounded number of participants which can vary at run-time. We introduce a notion of well-formedness to rule out meaningless or problematic specifications. This notion is verified with TRAC and demonstrated on several case studies borrowed from the smart contracts domain. Then, we evaluate the performance of TRAC using a set of randomised examples, studying the correlations between the features supported and the time taken to decide well-formedness.