Formal verification of persistence and liveness in the trust-based blockchain crowdsourcing consensus protocol

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a potential computing paradigm that exploits collective human intelligence to solve complex tasks, but it suffers from various safety and security problems. Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology to address most of the security issues, however, it is challenging to find an appropriate and trusted blockchain-based consensus protocol for crowdsourcing services. This work proposes a novel Trust-based Blockchain Crowdsourcing consensus protocol that selects a leader and validators based on various trust factors. The proposed protocol addresses a major issue of ensuring correctness associated with the safety and security-critical systems which has a vital importance because failure of such systems may lead to adverse consequences. Mainly it is focused on persistence and liveness properties preventing invalid block insertion and consensus delay attacks. Model checking technique is utilized because of its effectiveness and automatic nature to perform formal verification. The proposed protocol is specified using Communicating Sequential Programs, and the persistence and liveness properties are specified through Linear Temporal Logic. The model verification is performed by giving the formal model and the properties as input to the Process Analysis Toolkit which checks for the satisfaction or violation of the properties.