Reliable evidence: Auditability by typing

Abstract

Many protocols rely on audit trails to allow an impartial judge to verify a posteriori some property of a protocol run. However, in current practice the choice of what data to log is left to the programmer's intuition, and there is no guarantee that it constitutes enough evidence. We give a precise definition of auditability and we show how typechecking can be used to statically verify that a protocol always logs enough evidence. We apply our approach to several examples, including a full-scale auction-like protocol programmed in ML. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.