SONIC: Toolchain for formally-verifiable distributed contracts

What is it

SONIC is a toolchain for building partially-replicated state machines with capability-based memory access, whose history execution trace can be compressed with recursive zk-STARKs (i.e. they have a fixed-length computational integrity proofs).

What is capability-based memory access (or capability-addressable memory, CAM)? The computers we all used to are random memory access machines (RAM), where a software accesses freely-addressable global memory. This had opened a door for the all the vulnerabilities and hacks happening in computer systems across the world for the past decades... CAM model instead, divides all memory into parts (called words) addressable only with some access token (called capability). You may think of this as of a memory where each part is "owned" by certain party, and can be accessed or modified only given a proof of ownership. This is UltraSONIC, the underlying layer for SONIC.

Now, you can put this into a distributed context, such that the memory is accessible by multiple parties with different permissions, and the state of the computation (state machine) is replicable across all the parties - so you get CAM upgraded into a partially-replicated state machine (PRISM). SONIC takes such PRISM computers and enhances them with zk-STARKS, such that the cost of replication becomes fixed, independently of how long the system is run for. With that, you have a programs which can be formally (i.e. mathematically) verified to be safe, and at the same time run over a computer network in a trustless manner, with the same efficiency no matter how long they run.

What I can build

One of the main current applications for SONIC are smart contracts made with client-side validation, abstracted from a specific underlying blockchain or other consensus mechanism; however, as you can see, the number of applications for SONIC can be significantly larger. Using SONIC, one may build distributed software with capability-based access to the memory, including:

• a replicable database with formal safety guarantees;
• distributed operating system with formal safety guarantees;
• remote code execution environments (like in browsers, but with formal safety guarantees);
• blockchain or a zk-rollup;
• client-side validated smart contracts;
• or even distributed digital agents.

Ecosystem

SONIC is a part of a larger ecosystem used to build safe distributed software, which includes:

• Strict types: strong type system made with generalized algebraic data types (GADT) and dependent types;
• AluVM: a functional register-based virtual machine with a reduced instruction set (RISC); SONARE uses a zk-STARK-compatible subset of its instruction set architecture (called zk-AluVM);
• UltraSONIC: a transactional execution layer with capability-based memory access on top of zk-AluVM;
• [SONARE]: runtime environment for SONIC software;
• Cation: a general-purpose high-level programming language made with category theory, which features strict types, termination analysis and can be formally verified;
• Contractum: a domain-specific version of Cation for writing programs for SONARE.

License

Designed in 2019-2025 by Dr Maxim Orlovsky <orlovsky@ubideco.org>
Written in 2024-2025 by Dr Maxim Orlovsky <orlovsky@ubideco.org>

Copyright (C) 2019-2024 LNP/BP Standards Association, Switzerland.
Copyright (C) 2024-2025 Laboratories for Ubiquitous Deterministic Computing (UBIDECO),
                        Institute for Distributed and Cognitive Systems (InDCS), Switzerland.
Copyright (C) 2019-2025 Dr Maxim Orlovsky.
All rights under the above copyrights are reserved.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.