Formalism-Driven Development of Decentralized Systems
This work aims to reduce technical risk and ensure correct functioning for developers of decentralized systems by integrating formal methods into the development process.
This paper proposes Formalism-Driven Development (FDD), an iterative and incremental process for developing provably correct decentralized systems using formal methods. They also introduce Seniz, a framework with a new modeling language and scaffolds, to practicalize FDD, demonstrating its effectiveness through case studies.
Decentralized systems have been widely developed and applied to address security and privacy issues in centralized systems, especially since the advancement of distributed ledger technology. However, it is challenging to ensure their correct functioning with respect to their designs and minimize the technical risk before the delivery. Although formal methods have made significant progress over the past decades, a feasible solution based on formal methods from a development process perspective has not been well developed. In this paper, we formulate an iterative and incremental development process, named formalism-driven development (FDD), for developing provably correct decentralized systems under the guidance of formal methods. We also present a framework named Seniz, to practicalize FDD with a new modeling language and scaffolds. Furthermore, we conduct case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of FDD in practice with the support of Seniz.