Ethereum Research Forum Releases Ethereum TCB Client Article

Members of the Ethereum Foundation, George Kadianakis and Kev Wedderburn, have published an article titled "Ethereum TCB, Part 1: Client" on the Ethereum Research Forum. The article defines the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) as components, specifications, tools, and assumptions that are trusted rather than proven, and discusses how to abstract the TCB of Ethereum clients in light of the proliferation of formal verification. The article advocates for splitting software into easily verifiable "pure" modules (such as cryptography, SSZ) and "dirty" modules (such as networking) that have side effects and are difficult to verify, treating dirty modules as untrusted, focusing on verifying pure modules, and pushing the verified boundary as far as possible to network parsing, gossip, and synchronization logic. The article also distinguishes between "writing specifications and proving properties in Lean4" and "proving that implementations conform to those specifications." Specific paths include translating implementations in Rust and other languages to Lean4 (with the translator and Rust compiler still entering the TCB), writing modules in Lean4 and extracting them to C, aiming to write the client in Lean4, using RISC-V assembly to bypass conventional compilers (with ISA models still entering the TCB), or using verified compilers.