Bisimulations for verifying strategic abilities with an application to the ThreeBallot voting protocol

We propose a notion of alternating bisimulation for strategic abilities under imperfect information. The bisimulation preserves formulas of ATL⁎ for both the objective and subjective variants of the state-based semantics with imperfect information, which are commonly used in the modeling and verific...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Information and computation 2021-02, Vol.276, p.104552, Article 104552
Main Authors: Belardinelli, Francesco, Condurache, Rodica, Dima, Cătălin, Jamroga, Wojciech, Knapik, Michal
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alternating-time Temporal Logic
Bisimulations
Computer Science
Formal verification
Voting protocols
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Summary:We propose a notion of alternating bisimulation for strategic abilities under imperfect information. The bisimulation preserves formulas of ATL⁎ for both the objective and subjective variants of the state-based semantics with imperfect information, which are commonly used in the modeling and verification of multi-agent systems. Furthermore, we apply the theoretical result to the verification of coercion-resistance in the ThreeBallot voting system, a voting protocol that does not use cryptography. In particular, we show that natural simplifications of an initial model of the protocol are in fact bisimulations of the original model, and therefore satisfy the same ATL⁎ properties, including coercion-resistance. These simplifications allow the model-checking tool MCMAS to terminate on models with a larger number of voters and candidates, compared with the initial model.
ISSN:0890-5401
1090-2651
DOI:10.1016/j.ic.2020.104552