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Álvaro García-Pérez

Publications and source records attributed to Álvaro García-Pérez.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2025

Towards the type safety of Pure Subtype Systems (Full version)

Hutchins' Pure Subtype Systems (PSS) offer a unified framework for types and terms, promising significant advancements in language design for features like dependent types and higher-order subtyping. However, the theory has been hampered by a critical gap: a proof of type safety has remained an open problem for over a decade. The original attempt to prove this property relied on the conjectured commutativity of two fundamental reduction relations, equivalence and subtyping. Proving transitivity elimination, however, requires this commutativity, a property that is notoriously difficult to establish for higher-order subtyping systems. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing Machine-Based PSS (MPSS), a novel reformulation of the original system. MPSS integrates a continuation stack mechanism, reminiscent of the Krivine Abstract Machine, to keep track of arguments that are passed during function application, enabling more fine-grained reductions. This architectural change exposes crucial intermediate reduction steps that were absent in the original PSS. The primary contribution of our work is a direct proof that the equivalence and subtyping reductions in MPSS commute. This result formally establishes transitivity elimination, which is the cornerstone of the inversion lemma required for type safety. We conclude by outlining a pathway from our foundational result to a complete, type-safe system, thereby paving the way for the practical realization of PSS-based languages.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2024

Equivalence of eval-readback and eval-apply big-step evaluators by structuring the lambda-calculus's strategy space

We study the equivalence between eval-readback and eval-apply big-step evaluators in the general setting of the pure lambda calculus. We study `one-step' equivalence (same strategy) and also discuss `big-step' equivalence (same final result). One-step equivalence extends for free to evaluators in other settings (calculi, programming languages, proof assistants, etc.) by restricting the terms (closed, convergent) while maintaining the strategy. We present a proof that one-step equivalence holds when (1) the `readback' stage satisfies straightforward well-formedness provisos, (2) the `eval' stage implements a `uniform' strategy, and (3) the eval-apply evaluator implements a `balanced hybrid' strategy that has `eval' as a subsidiary strategy. The proof proceeds the `lightweight fusion by fixed-point promotion' program transformation on evaluator implementations to fuse readback and eval into the balanced hybrid. The proof can be followed with no previous knowledge of the transformation. We use Haskell 2010 as the implementation language, with all evaluators written in monadic style to guarantee semantics (strategy) preservation, but the choice of implementation language is immaterial. To illustrate the large scope of the equivalence, we provide an extensive survey of the strategy space using canonical eval-apply evaluators in code and big-step `natural' operational semantics. We discuss the strategies' properties, some of their uses, and their abstract machines. We improve the formal definition of uniform and hybrid strategy, use it to structure the strategy space, and to obtain generic higher-order evaluators which are used in the equivalence proof. We introduce a systematic notation for both evaluator styles and use it to summarise strategy and evaluator equivalences, including (non-)equivalences within a style and (non-)equivalences between styles not proven by the transformation.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2024

Fantastyc: Blockchain-based Federated Learning Made Secure and Practical

Federated Learning is a decentralized framework that enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model under the orchestration of a central server without sharing their local data. The centrality of this framework represents a point of failure which is addressed in literature by blockchain-based federated learning approaches. While ensuring a fully-decentralized solution with traceability, such approaches still face several challenges about integrity, confidentiality and scalability to be practically deployed. In this paper, we propose Fantastyc, a solution designed to address these challenges that have been never met together in the state of the art.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2024

Rule Formats for Nominal Process Calculi

The nominal transition systems (NTSs) of Parrow et al. describe the operational semantics of nominal process calculi. We study NTSs in terms of the nominal residual transition systems (NRTSs) that we introduce. We provide rule formats for the specifications of NRTSs that ensure that the associated NRTS is an NTS and apply them to the operational specification of the early pi-calculus. Our study stems from the recent Nominal SOS of Cimini et al. and from earlier works in nominal sets and nominal logic by Gabbay, Pitts and their collaborators.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2022

SoK: Achieving State Machine Replication in Blockchains based on Repeated Consensus

This paper revisits the ubiquitous problem of achieving state machine replication in blockchains based on repeated consensus, like Tendermint. To achieve state machine replication in blockchains built on top of consensus, one needs to guarantee fairness of user transactions. A huge body of work has been carried out on the relation between state machine replication and consensus in the past years, in a variety of system models and with respect to varied problem specifications. We systematize this work by proposing novel and rigorous abstractions for state machine replication and repeated consensus in a system model that accounts for realistic blockchains in which blocks may contain several transactions issued by one or more users, and where validity and order of transactions within a block is determined by an external application-dependent function that can capture various approaches for order-fairness in the literature. Based on these abstractions, we propose a reduction from state machine replication to repeated consensus, such that user fairness is achieved using the consensus module as a black box. This approach allows to achieve fairness as an add-on on top of preexisting consensus modules in blockchains based on repeated consensus.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2019

Deconstructing Stellar Consensus (Extended Version)

Some of the recent blockchain proposals, such as Stellar and Ripple, allow for open membership while using quorum-like structures typical for classical Byzantine consensus with closed membership. This is achieved by constructing quorums in a decentralised way: each participant independently chooses whom to trust, and quorums arise from these individual decisions. Unfortunately, the consensus protocols underlying such blockchains are poorly understood, and their correctness has not been rigorously investigated. In this paper we rigorously prove correct the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), with our proof giving insights into the protocol structure and its use of lower-level abstractions. To this end, we first propose an abstract version of SCP that uses as a black box Stellar's federated voting primitive (analogous to reliable Byzantine broadcast), previously investigated by García-Pérez and Gotsman. The abstract consensus protocol highlights a modular structure in Stellar and can be proved correct by reusing the previous results on federated voting. However, it is unsuited for realistic implementations, since its processes maintain infinite state. We thus establish a refinement between the abstract protocol and the concrete SCP that uses only finite state, thereby carrying over the result about the correctness of former to the latter. Our results help establish the theoretical foundations of decentralised blockchains like Stellar and gain confidence in their correctness.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2019

Rule Formats for Nominal Process Calculi

The nominal transition systems (NTSs) of Parrow et al. describe the operational semantics of nominal process calculi. We study NTSs in terms of the nominal residual transition systems (NRTSs) that we introduce. We provide rule formats for the specifications of NRTSs that ensure that the associated NRTS is an NTS and apply them to the operational specifications of the early and late pi-calculus. We also explore alternative specifications of the NTSs in which we allow residuals of abstraction sort, and introduce translations between the systems with and without residuals of abstraction sort. Our study stems from the Nominal SOS of Cimini et al. and from earlier works in nominal sets and nominal logic by Gabbay, Pitts and their collaborators.

cs.LO↗
arXiv2018

Federated Byzantine Quorum Systems (Extended Version)

Some of the recent blockchain proposals, such as Stellar and Ripple, use quorum-like structures typical for Byzantine consensus while allowing for open membership. This is achieved by constructing quorums in a decentralised way: each participant independently chooses whom to trust, and quorums arise from these individual decisions. Unfortunately, the theoretical foundations underlying such blockchains have not been thoroughly investigated. To close this gap, in this paper we study decentralised quorum construction by means of federated Byzantine quorum systems, used by Stellar. We rigorously prove the correctness of basic broadcast abstractions over federated quorum systems and establish their relationship to the classical Byzantine quorum systems. In particular, we prove correctness in the realistic setting where Byzantine nodes may lie about their trust choices. We show that this setting leads to a novel variant of Byzantine quorum systems where different nodes may have different understanding of what constitutes a quorum.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2018

Paxos Consensus, Deconstructed and Abstracted (Extended Version)

Lamport's Paxos algorithm is a classic consensus protocol for state machine replication in environments that admit crash failures. Many versions of Paxos exploit the protocol's intrinsic properties for the sake of gaining better run-time performance, thus widening the gap between the original description of the algorithm, which was proven correct, and its real-world implementations. In this work, we address the challenge of specifying and verifying complex Paxos-based systems by (a) devising composable specifications for implementations of Paxos's single-decree version, and (b) engineering disciplines to reason about protocol-aware, semantics-preserving optimisations to single-decree Paxos. In a nutshell, our approach elaborates on the deconstruction of single-decree Paxos by Boichat et al. We provide novel non-deterministic specifications for each module in the deconstruction and prove that the implementations refine the corresponding specifications, such that the proofs of the modules that remain unchanged can be reused across different implementations. We further reuse this result and show how to obtain a verified implementation of Multi-Paxos from a verified implementation of single-decree Paxos, by a series of novel protocol-aware transformations of the network semantics, which we prove to be behaviour-preserving.

cs.DC↗