No abstract

To implement a blockchain, the trend is now to integrate a non-trivial Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm instead of the seminal idea of waiting to receive blocks to decide upon the longest branch. After a decade of existence, blockchains trade now large amounts of valuable assets and a simple disagreement could lead to disastrous losses. Unfortunately, Byzantine consensus solutions used in blockchains are at best proved correct "by hand" as we are not aware of any of them having been formally verified.In this paper, we propose two contributions: (i) we illustrate the severity of the problem by listing six vulnerabilities of blockchain consensus including two new counter-examples; (ii) we then formally verify two Byzantine fault tolerant components of Red Belly Blockchain using the ByMC model checker. First, we specify a simple broadcast primitive in 116 lines of code that is verified in 40 seconds on a 2-core Intel machine. Then, we specify a blockchain consensus algorithm in 276 lines of code that is verified in 17 minutes on a 64-core AMD machine using MPI.To conclude, we argue that it has now become both relatively simple and crucial to formally verify the correctness of blockchain consensus protocols.

We propose ARIANN, a low-interaction framework to perform private training and inference of standard deep neural networks on sensitive data. This framework implements semi-honest 2-party computation and leverages function secret sharing, a recent cryptographic protocol that only uses lightweight primitives to achieve an efficient online phase with a single message of the size of the inputs, for operations like comparison and multiplication which are building blocks of neural networks. Built on top of PyTorch, it offers a wide range of functions including ReLU, MaxPool and BatchNorm, and allows to use models like AlexNet or ResNet18. We report experimental results for inference and training over distant servers. Last, we propose an extension to support n-party private federated learning.

We consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows-implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract-successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this work, cross-chain payment problems did not require this success, or any form of progress. We demonstrate that it is possible to solve this problem when assuming synchrony, in the sense that each message is guaranteed to arrive within a known amount of time, but impossible to solve without assuming synchrony. Yet, we solve a weaker variant of this problem, where success is conditional on the patience of the participants, without assuming synchrony, and in the presence of Byzantine failures. We also discuss the relation with the recently defined cross-chain deals.

In this paper, we consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrowsimplemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract-successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this work, cross-chain payment problems did not require this success or any form of progress. We introduce a new specification formalism called Asynchronous Networks of Timed Automata (ANTA) to formalise such protocols. We present the first cross-chain payment protocol that ensures termination in a bounded amount of time and works correctly in the presence of clock skew. We then demonstrate that it is impossible to solve this problem without assuming synchrony, in the sense that each message is guaranteed to arrive within a known amount of time. We also offer a protocol that solves an eventually terminating variant of this cross-chain payment problem without synchrony, and even in the presence of Byzantine failures.