FastPay allows a set of distributed authorities, some of which are Byzantine, to maintain a high-integrity and availability settlement system for pre-funded payments. It can be used to settle payments in a native unit of value (crypto-currency), or as a financial side-infrastructure to support retail payments in fiat currencies. FastPay is based on Byzantine Consistent Broadcast as its core primitive, foregoing the expenses of full atomic commit channels (consensus). The resulting system has low-latency for both confirmation and payment finality. Remarkably, each authority can be sharded across many machines to allow unbounded horizontal scalability. Our experiments demonstrate intra-continental confirmation latency of less than 100ms, making FastPay applicable to point of sale payments. In laboratory environments, we achieve over 80,000 transactions per second with 20 authorities---surpassing the requirements of current retail card payment networks, while significantly increasing their robustness.

Reasoning about the knowledge of an attacker is a necessary step in many formal analyses of security protocols. In the framework of the applied pi-calculus, as in similar languages based on equational logics, knowledge is typically expressed by two relations: deducibility and static equivalence. Several decision procedures have been proposed for these relations under a variety of equational theories. However, each theory has its particular algorithm, and none has been implemented so far. We provide a generic procedure for deducibility and static equivalence that takes as input any convergent rewrite system. We show that our algorithm covers most of the existing decision procedures for convergent theories. We also provide an efficient implementation and compare it briefly with the tools ProVerif and KiSs.

The indistinguishability of two pieces of data (or two lists of pieces of data) can be represented formally in terms of a relation called static equivalence. Static equivalence depends on an underlying equational theory. The choice of an inappropriate equational theory can lead to overly pessimistic or overly optimistic notions of indistinguishability, and in turn to security criteria that require protection against impossible attacks or – worse yet – that ignore feasible ones. In this paper, we define and justify an equational theory for standard, fundamental cryptographic operations. This equational theory yields a notion of static equivalence that implies computational indistinguishability. Static equivalence remains liberal enough for use in applications. In particular, we develop and analyze a principled formal account of guessing attacks in terms of static equivalence.

We provide an effective procedure for deciding the existence of off-line guessing attacks on security protocols, for a bounded number of sessions.The procedure consists of a constraint solving algorithm for determining satisfiability and equivalence of a class of second-order E-unification problems, where the equational theory E is presented by a convergent subterm rewriting system.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first decidability result to use the generic definition of off-line guessing attacks due to Corin et al. based on static equivalence in the applied pi calculus.