Publications

Proteus: A DLT-agnostic emulation and analysis framework

Van Dam, Russell V.; Dinh, Thien-Nam D.; Cordi, Christopher N.; Jacobus, Gregory J.; Pattengale, Nicholas D.; Elliott, Steven E.

This paper presents Proteus, a framework for conducting rapid, emulation-based analysis of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) using FIREWHEEL, an orchestration tool that assists a user in building, controlling, observing, and analyzing realistic experiments of distributed systems. Proteus is designed to support any DLT that has some form of a “transaction” and which operates on a peer-to-peer network layer. Proteus provides a framework for an investigator to set up a network of nodes, execute rich agent-driven behaviors, and extract run-time observations. Proteus relies on common features of DLTs to define agent-driven scenarios in a DLT-agnostic way allowing for those scenarios to be executed against different DLTs. We demonstrate the utility of using Proteus by executing a 51% attack on an emulated Ethereum network containing 2000 nodes.