First Formal Proof of Keeta's Consensus: Safety Holds, But Lockout Looms
Modeling and Verification of Keeta's Consensus [pdf]
Keeta's two-phase consensus algorithm, described informally in its whitepaper, has now been formally specified in Quint and model-checked with TLC under Byzantine faults. The model proves agreement is preserved for a fixed set of equally weighted representatives, and argues the guarantee generalizes. However, it also reveals conditions where a contended account can be permanently locked out. The live, stake-weighted voting remains unverified.
Without such an analysis, the correctness of the protocol cannot be established beyond reasonable doubt, and any deployment of Keeta in real financial infrastructure is based on unverified assumptions.
- rkeene2
Keeta developer here. I think the way we handle execution of code will be significantly different from Sui, both for stateful and stateless executions.
- dlahoda
> Clients are responsible for managing conflicts and resubmitting transactions if necessary.
"Fat" clients need to talk to many "RPC"s at once and get final vote on "two phase" commit to their transaction.
Client is like Builder in Proposer builder separation.
Each representative stores all data for all accounts. They do DA.
- xescure
Keeta is a new high-throughput payments blockchain. Its origins trace back to Nano, the feeless DAG DLT, and Facebook's FastPay, but it has plenty of novel contributions which warrant a formal look.
Here I present a formal Quint specification for its consensus protocol, model-checked under a Byzantine fault model. Safety was found to be preserved within the fault-bounds and under a constant weight model, and the possibility of FastPay style lockouts was reproduced as expected.
The direction for future research depends on the direction Keeta takes; checkpoints and epochs (similar to Sui) are the features to watch there.
Prerequisite paper: https://keeta.com/whitepaper.pdf
Google marketing slop: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/financial-services/how-...