Off-chain protocols constitute one of the most promising approaches to solve the inherent scalability issue of blockchain technologies. The core idea is to let parties transact on-chain only once to establish a channel between them, leveraging later
on the resulting channel paths to perform arbitrarily many peer-to-peer transactions off-chain. While significant progress has been made in terms of proof techniques for off-chain protocols, existing approaches do not capture the game-theoretic incentives at the core of their design, which led to overlooking significant attack vectors like the Wormhole attack in the past. This work introduces the first game-theoretic model that is expressive enough to reason about the security of off-chain protocols. We advocate the use of Extensive Form Games - EFGs and introduce two instances of EFGs to capture security properties of the closing and the routing of the Lightning Network. Specifically, we model the closing protocol, which relies on punishment mechanisms to disincentivize the uploading on-chain of old channel states, as well as the routing protocol, thereby formally characterizing the Wormhole attack, a vulnerability that undermines the fee-based incentive mechanism underlying the Lightning Network.
Despite recent advances in automating theorem proving in full first-order theories, inductive reasoning still poses a serious challenge to state-of-the-art theorem provers. The reason for that is that in first-order logic induction requires an infini
te number of axioms, which is not a feasible input to a computer-aided theorem prover requiring a finite input. Mathematical practice is to specify these infinite sets of axioms as axiom schemes. Unfortunately these schematic definitions cannot be formalized in first-order logic, and therefore not supported as inputs for first-order theorem provers. In this work we introduce a new method, inspired by the field of axiomatic theories of truth, that allows to express schematic inductive definitions, in the standard syntax of multi-sorted first-order logic. Further we test the practical feasibility of the method with state-of-the-art theorem provers, comparing it to solvers native techniques for handling induction.
Despite recent advances in automating theorem proving in full first-order theories, inductive reasoning still poses a serious challenge to state-of-the-art theorem provers. The reason for that is that in first-order logic induction requires an infini
te number of axioms, which is not a feasible input to a computer-aided theorem prover requiring a finite input. Mathematical practice is to specify these infinite sets of axioms as axiom schemes. Unfortunately these schematic definitions cannot be formalized in first-order logic, and therefore not supported as inputs for first-order theorem provers. In this work we introduce a new method, inspired by the field of axiomatic theories of truth, that allows to express schematic inductive definitions, in the standard syntax of multi-sorted first-order logic. Further we test the practical feasibility of the method with state-of-the-art theorem provers, comparing it to solvers native techniques for handling induction. This paper is an extended version of the LFMTP 21 submission with the same title.
We introduce MORA, an automated tool for generating invariants of probabilistic programs. Inputs to MORA are so-called Prob-solvable loops, that is probabilistic programs with polynomial assignments over random variables and parametrized distribution
s. Combining methods from symbolic computation and statistics, MORA computes invariant properties over higher-order moments of loop variables, expressing, for example, statistical properties, such as expected values and variances, over the value distribution of loop variables.
We describe a dataset expressing and proving properties of graph trails, using Isabelle/HOL. We formalize the reasoning about strictly increasing and decreasing trails, using weights over edges, and prove lower bounds over the length of trails in wei
ghted graphs. We do so by extending the graph theory library of Isabelle/HOL with an algorithm computing the length of a longest strictly decreasing graph trail starting from a vertex for a given weight distribution, and prove that any decreasing trail is also an increasing one. This preprint has been accepted for publication at CICM 2020.
Provably correct software is one of the key challenges in our softwaredriven society. While formal verification establishes the correctness of a given program, the result of program synthesis is a program which is correct by construction. In this pap
er we overview some of our results for both of these scenarios when analysing programs with loops. The class of loops we consider can be modelled by a system of linear recurrence equations with constant coefficients, called C-finite recurrences. We first describe an algorithmic approach for synthesising all polynomial equality invariants of such non-deterministic numeric single-path loops. By reverse engineering invariant synthesis, we then describe an automated method for synthesising program loops satisfying a given set of polynomial loop invariants. Our results have applications towards proving partial correctness of programs, compiler optimisation and generating number sequences from algebraic relations. This is a preprint that was invited for publication at VMCAI 2021.
Motivated by applications of first-order theorem proving to software analysis, we introduce a new inference rule, called subsumption demodulation, to improve support for reasoning with conditional equalities in superposition-based theorem proving. We
show that subsumption demodulation is a simplification rule that does not require radical changes to the underlying superposition calculus. We implemented subsumption demodulation in the theorem prover Vampire, by extending Vampire with a new clause index and adapting its multi-literal matching component. Our experiments, using the TPTP and SMT-LIB repositories, show that subsumption demodulation in Vampire can solve many new problems that could so far not be solved by state-of-the-art reasoners.
Many applications of formal methods require automated reasoning about system properties, such as system safety and security. To improve the performance of automated reasoning engines, such as SAT/SMT solvers and first-order theorem prover, it is nece
ssary to understand both the successful and failing attempts of these engines towards producing formal certificates, such as logical proofs and/or models. Such an analysis is challenging due to the large number of logical formulas generated during proof/model search. In this paper we focus on saturation-based first-order theorem proving and introduce the SATVIS tool for interactively visualizing saturation-based proof attempts in first-order theorem proving. We build SATVIS on top of the world-leading theorem prover VAMPIRE, by interactively visualizing the saturation attempts of VAMPIRE in SATVIS. Our work combines the automatic layout and visualization of the derivation graph induced by the saturation attempt with interactive transformations and search functionality. As a result, we are able to analyze and debug (failed) proof attempts of VAMPIRE. Thanks to its interactive visualisation, we believe SATVIS helps both experts and non-experts in theorem proving to understand first-order proofs and analyze/refine failing proof attempts of first-order provers.
Given a lattice L in Z^m and a subset A of R^m, we say that a point in A is lonely if it is not equivalent modulo L to another point of A. We are interested in identifying lonely points for specific choices of L when A is a dilated standard simplex,
and in conditions on L which ensure that the number of lonely points is unbounded as the simplex dilation goes to infinity.
We describe the Aligator.jl software package for automatically generating all polynomial invariants of the rich class of extended P-solvable loops with nested conditionals. Aligator.jl is written in the programming language Julia and is open-source.
Aligator.jl transforms program loops into a system of algebraic recurrences and implements techniques from symbolic computation to solve recurrences, derive closed form solutions of loop variables and infer the ideal of polynomial invariants by variable elimination based on Grobner basis computation.
