Automating Game Reasoning in Blockchain Security

On November 25, 2024, Laura Kovács held the second talk in the seminar series “Women in Logic Online”!

If you missed the talk, you can now watch it on the VCLA Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka2P0TQ3vKs

In addition, you may download the slides for your review (coming soon).

ABSTRACT:

We advocate a game-theoretic approach for the security analysis of blockchain protocols.

Doing so, we model protocols as games to precisely capture security properties and apply automated reasoning techniques to determine whether a game-theoretic protocol model is game-theoretically secure. Security analysis becomes a satisfiability checking problem in first-order real arithmetic, which we solve within our CheckMate verifier. Our method has been successfully applied to decentralized protocols, board games, and game-theoretic examples.

This is a joint work with Ivana Bocevska, Lea Brugger, Anja Petkovic Komel, Sophie Rain and Michael Rawson.

SHORT BIO:

Laura Kovács is a full professor of computer science at the TU Wien, leading the automated program reasoning (APRe) group of the Formal Methods in Systems Engineering division. Her research focuses on the design and development of new theories, technologies, and tools for program analysis, with a particular focus on automated assertion generation, symbolic summation, computer algebra, and automated theorem proving. She is the co-developer of the Vampire theorem prover and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow of Sweden. Her research has also been awarded with an ERC Starting Grant 2014, an ERC Proof of Concept Grant 2018, an ERC Consolidator Grant 2020, and two Amazon Research Awards (2020 and 2023). Recently, she received financial support from LEA Frauenfonds to disseminate unplugged computer science to elementary schools, while organising computer science workshops with school children at the TU Wien.

Women in Logic https://womeninlogic.org/