Verifying Randomized Consensus Protocols with Common Coins

TL;DR

This paper extends probabilistic threshold automata to verify randomized fault-tolerant consensus protocols with common coins, ensuring correctness of protocols used in cloud and blockchain systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel extension of PTA to model common coins by adding a process, overcoming symmetry challenges for verification.

Findings

Verified 8 protocols for agreement, validity, and termination.

Extended PTA to handle common coins in randomized protocols.

Addressed symmetry issues caused by common-coin process.

Abstract

Randomized fault-tolerant consensus protocols with common coins are widely used in cloud computing and blockchain platforms. Due to their fundamental role, it is vital to guarantee their correctness. Threshold automata is a formal model designed for the verification of fault-tolerant consensus protocols. It has recently been extended to probabilistic threshold automata (PTAs) to verify randomized fault-tolerant consensus protocols. Nevertheless, PTA can only model randomized consensus protocols with local coins. In this work, we extend PTA to verify randomized fault-tolerant consensus protocols with common coins. Our main idea is to add a process to simulate the common coin (the so-called common-coin process). Although the addition of the common-coin process destroys the symmetry and poses technical challenges, we show how PTA can be adapted to overcome the challenges. We apply our approach to verify the agreement, validity and almost-sure termination properties of 8 randomized consensus protocols with common coins.