arXiv subjects

Franck Cassez

Publications and source records attributed to Franck Cassez.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

CATs: Secure Blockchain Interoperability with Cross-chain Atomic Transactions

We propose a protocol for cross-chain atomic transactions (CATs), enabling composable atomic execution across different blockchains. The protocol addresses the key interoperability challenge of providing atomicity guarantees in the presence of asynchronous communication and Byzantine actors. It preserves chain autonomy by allowing each blockchain to maintain its own execution model while participating in coordinated cross-chain operations. The design introduces a shared coordination layer involving sequencers, transaction processors, a coordinator, and a confirmation layer which together ensure that either all parts of a CAT succeed or none do. To prevent unnecessary blocking, we separate transaction execution into accepted and postponed sets, with the coordination layer resolving the outcomes of CATs within a few rounds. We further introduce timeouts and dependency-depth bounds for liveness and mitigation of cascading delays. Our formal analysis establishes strong safety and liveness guarantees and demonstrates that the protocol achieves minimal blocking for independent transactions while ensuring bounded blocking time for dependent transactions. Experimental evaluation shows high CAT success when cross-chain transactions are a modest share of traffic, and characterizes the CAT-lifetime trade-off between success and dependent-transaction latency. This protocol enables fast, secure, and deterministic atomic cross-chain execution while preserving chain autonomy, providing a foundation for scalable blockchain interoperability solutions.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Formal and Executable Semantics of the Ethereum Virtual Machine in Dafny

The Ethereum protocol implements a replicated state machine. The network participants keep track of the system state by: 1) agreeing on the sequence of transactions to be processed and 2) computing the state transitions that correspond to the sequence of transactions. Ethereum transactions are programs, called smart contracts, and computing a state transition requires executing some code. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) provides this capability and can execute programs written in EVM bytecode. We present a formal and executable semantics of the EVM written in the verification-friendly language Dafny: it provides (i) a readable, formal and verified specification of the semantics of the EVM; (ii) a framework to formally reason about bytecode.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2022

Deductive Verification of Smart Contracts with Dafny

We present a methodology to develop verified smart contracts. We write smart contracts, their specifications and implementations in the verification-friendly language Dafny. In our methodology the ability to write specifications, implementations and to reason about correctness is a primary concern. We propose a simple, concise yet powerful solution to reasoning about contracts that have external calls. This includes arbitrary re-entrancy which is a major source of bugs and attacks in smart contracts. Although we do not yet have a compiler from Dafny to EVM bytecode, the results we obtain on the Dafny code can reasonably be assumed to hold on Solidity code: the translation of the Dafny code to Solidity is straightforward. As a result our approach can readily be used to develop and deploy safer contracts.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2021

Formal Verification of the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain

We report our experience in the formal verification of the reference implementation of the Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain is the backbone component of the new Proof-of-Stake Ethereum 2.0 network: it is in charge of tracking information about the validators, their stakes, their attestations (votes) and if some validators are found to be dishonest, to slash them (they lose some of their stakes). The Beacon Chain is mission-critical and any bug in it could compromise the whole network. The Beacon Chain reference implementation developed by the Ethereum Foundation is written in Python, and provides a detailed operational description of the state machine each Beacon Chain's network participant (node) must implement. We have formally specified and verified the absence of runtime errors in (a large and critical part of) the Beacon Chain reference implementation using the verification-friendly language Dafny. During the course of this work, we have uncovered several issues, proposed verified fixes. We have also synthesised functional correctness specifications that enable us to provide guarantees beyond runtime errors. Our software artefact is available at https://github.com/ConsenSys/eth2.0-dafny.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2021

Verification of the Incremental Merkle Tree Algorithm with Dafny

The Deposit Smart Contract (DSC) is an instrumental component of the Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 infrastructure. We have developed the first machine-checkable version of the incremental Merkle tree algorithm used in the DSC. We present our new and original correctness proof of the algorithm along with the Dafny machine-checkable version. The main results are: 1) a new proof of total correctness; 2) a software artefact with the proof in the form of the complete Dafny code base and 3) new provably correct optimisations of the algorithm.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2020

Verification and Parameter Synthesis for Real-Time Programs using Refinement of Trace Abstraction

We address the safety verification and synthesis problems for real-time systems. We introduce real-time programs that are made of instructions that can perform assignments to discrete and real-valued variables. They are general enough to capture interesting classes of timed systems such as timed automata, stopwatch automata, time(d) Petri nets and hybrid automata. We propose a semi-algorithm using refinement of trace abstractions to solve both the reachability verification problem and the parameter synthesis problem for real-time programs. All of the algorithms proposed have been implemented and we have conducted a series of experiments, comparing the performance of our new approach to state-of-the-art tools in classical reachability, robustness analysis and parameter synthesis for timed systems. We show that our new method provides solutions to problems which are unsolvable by the current state-of-the-art tools.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2015

Timed Automata for Modelling Caches and Pipelines

In this paper, we focus on modelling the timing aspects of binary programs running on architectures featuring caches and pipelines. The objective is to obtain a timed automaton model to compute tight bounds for the worst-case execution time (WCET) of the programs using model-checking techniques.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2014

The Complexity of Synchronous Notions of Information Flow Security

The paper considers the complexity of verifying that a finite state system satisfies a number of definitions of information flow security. The systems model considered is one in which agents operate synchronously with awareness of the global clock. This enables timing based attacks to be captured, whereas previous work on this topic has dealt primarily with asynchronous systems. Versions of the notions of nondeducibility on inputs, nondeducibility on strategies, and an unwinding based notion are formulated for this model. All three notions are shown to be decidable, and their computational complexity is characterised.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2013

Predictability of Event Occurrences in Timed Systems

We address the problem of predicting events' occurrences in partially observable timed systems modelled by timed automata. Our contribution is many-fold: 1) we give a definition of bounded predictability, namely k-predictability, that takes into account the minimum delay between the prediction and the actual event's occurrence; 2) we show that 0-predictability is equivalent to the original notion of predictability of S. Genc and S. Lafortune; 3) we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for k-predictability (which is very similar to k-diagnosability) and give a simple algorithm to check k-predictability; 4) we address the problem of predictability of events' occurrences in timed automata and show that the problem is PSPACE-complete.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2012

Proceedings Seventh Conference on Systems Software Verification

This volume contains the papers accepted at the 7th Systems Software Verification Conference (SSV 2012), held in Sydney, November 28-30, 2012. The aim of SSV workshops and conference series is to bring together researchers and developers from both academia and industry who are facing real software and real problems with the goal of finding real, applicable solutions.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2012

Control and Synthesis of Non-Interferent Timed Systems

In this paper, we focus on the synthesis of secure timed systems which are modelled as timed automata. The security property that the system must satisfy is a non-interference property. Intuitively, non-interference ensures the absence of any causal dependency from a high-level domain to a lower-level domain. Various notions of non-interference have been defined in the literature, and in this paper we focus on Strong Non-deterministic Non-Interference (SNNI) and two (bi)simulation based variants thereof (CSNNI and BSNNI). We consider timed non-interference properties for timed systems specified by timed automata and we study the two following problems: (1) check whether it is possible to find a sub-system so that it is non-interferent; if yes (2) compute a (largest) sub-system which is non-interferent.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2012

Controllers with Minimal Observation Power (Application to Timed Systems)

We consider the problem of controller synthesis under imperfect information in a setting where there is a set of available observable predicates equipped with a cost function. The problem that we address is the computation of a subset of predicates sufficient for control and whose cost is minimal. Our solution avoids a full exploration of all possible subsets of predicates and reuses some information between different iterations. We apply our approach to timed systems. We have developed a tool prototype and analyze the performance of our optimization algorithm on two case studies.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2011

Computation of WCET using Program Slicing and Real-Time Model-Checking

Computing accurate WCET on modern complex architectures is a challenging task. This problem has been devoted a lot of attention in the last decade but there are still some open issues. First, the control flow graph (CFG) of a binary program is needed to compute the WCET and this CFG is built using some internal knowledge of the compiler that generated the binary code; moreover once constructed the CFG has to be manually annotated with loop bounds. Second, the algorithms to compute the WCET (combining Abstract Interpretation and Integer Linear Programming) are tailored for specific architectures: changing the architecture (e.g. replacing an ARM7 by an ARM9) requires the design of a new ad hoc algorithm. Third, the tightness of the computed results (obtained using the available tools) are not compared to actual execution times measured on the real hardware. In this paper we address the above mentioned problems. We first describe a fully automatic method to compute a CFG based solely on the binary program to analyse. Second, we describe the model of the hardware as a product of timed automata, and this model is independent from the program description. The model of a program running on a hardware is obtained by synchronizing (the automaton of) the program with the (timed automata) model of the hardware. Computing the WCET is reduced to a reachability problem on the synchronised model and solved using the model-checker UPPAAL. Finally, we present a rigorous methodology that enables us to compare our computed results to actual execution times measured on a real platform, the ARM920T.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2010

Dynamic Observers for Fault Diagnosis of Timed Systems

In this paper we extend the work on \emph{dynamic ob\-servers} for fault diagnosis to timed automata. We study sensor minimization problems with static observers and then address the problem of computing the most permissive dynamic observer for a system given by a timed automaton.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2010

Timed Games for Computing Worst-Case Execution-Times

In this paper we introduce a framework for computing upper bounds yet accurate WCET for hardware platforms with caches and pipelines. The methodology we propose consists of 3 steps: 1) given a program to analyse, compute an equivalent (WCET-wise) abstract program; 2) build a timed game by composing this abstract program with a network of timed automata modeling the architecture; and 3) compute the WCET as the optimal time to reach a winning state in this game. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework on standard benchmarks for an ARM9 processor with instruction and data caches, and compute the WCET with UPPAAL-TiGA. We also show that this framework can easily be extended to take into account dynamic changes in the speed of the processor during program execution. %

cs.SE↗

arXiv2010

Fault Diagnosis with Dynamic Observers

In this paper, we review some recent results about the use of dynamic observers for fault diagnosis of discrete event systems. Fault diagnosis consists in synthesizing a diagnoser that observes a given plant and identifies faults in the plant as soon as possible after their occurrence. Existing literature on this problem has considered the case of fixed static observers, where the set of observable events is fixed and does not change during execution of the system. In this paper, we consider dynamic observers: an observer can "switch" sensors on or off, thus dynamically changing the set of events it wishes to observe. It is known that checking diagnosability (i.e., whether a given observer is capable of identifying faults) can be solved in polynomial time for static observers, and we show that the same is true for dynamic ones. We also solve the problem of dynamic observers' synthesis and prove that a most permissive observer can be computed in doubly exponential time, using a game-theoretic approach. We further investigate optimization problems for dynamic observers and define a notion of cost of an observer.

cs.FL↗

arXiv2010

A Note on Fault Diagnosis Algorithms

In this paper we review algorithms for checking diagnosability of discrete-event systems and timed automata. We point out that the diagnosability problems in both cases reduce to the emptiness problem for (timed) Büchi automata. Moreover, it is known that, checking whether a discrete-event system is diagnosable, can also be reduced to checking bounded diagnosability. We establish a similar result for timed automata. We also provide a synthesis of the complexity results for the different fault diagnosis problems.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2010

The Complexity of Codiagnosability for Discrete Event and Timed Systems

In this paper we study the fault codiagnosis problem for discrete event systems given by finite automata (FA) and timed systems given by timed automata (TA). We provide a uniform characterization of codiagnosability for FA and TA which extends the necessary and sufficient condition that characterizes diagnosability. We also settle the complexity of the codiagnosability problems both for FA and TA and show that codiagnosability is PSPACE-complete in both cases. For FA this improves on the previously known bound (EXPTIME) and for TA it is a new result. Finally we address the codiagnosis problem for TA under bounded resources and show it is 2EXPTIME-complete.

cs.FL↗