A Survey of Smart Contract Formal Specification and Verification

Tolmach, Palina; Li, Yang; Lin, Shang-Wei; Liu, Yang; Li, Zengxiang

doi:10.1145/3464421

Cited by 137 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…It can be used to encode functional programs. The π−calculus and applications have proven successful in reasoning about cryptographic protocols and it is also applied in formal analysis of consensus protocols in blockchain [63].…”

Section: ) Pi-calculusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction of Formal Methods in Blockchain Consensus Mechanism and Its Associated Protocols

2022

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As the size of data is increasing exponentially, its security is a major concern, emerging technology like blockchain is used to provide security. Since the inception of blockchain, it has been adopted by researchers and industry, however, it gained enormous attention after cryptocurrency. It can be defined as a means of storing information in such a way that modification and hacking the system is difficult or impossible. A blockchain is a decentralized ledger that is digital and public, consisting of records of transactions called blocks. A consensus technology assures that all nodes agree on a unique sequence for appending blocks. A comprehensive examination of these algorithms will aid in understanding how and why each blockchain operates in the manner that it does. In this study, we addressed extensively used consensus techniques in the blockchain and the importance of consensus protocol in blockchain technology. The underlying consensus algorithm is a critical component of every blockchain system which determine the performance and security of the system. Ensuring the correctness of consensus protocols is uttermost important to create trust in the blockchain-based systems and formal methods are the way to create that trust and develop correct and verified systems. Formal modeling is a method of writing a system mathematically and examining the correctness and verifying the developed system. This study analyzed the importance of consensus mechanisms and how formal methods are helping to develop a correct blockchain-based system. This paper is a rigorous study on the current scenario of the application of formal methods in the consensus mechanism of blockchain for their verification.

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Section: ) Pi-calculusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction of Formal Methods in Blockchain Consensus Mechanism and Its Associated Protocols

2022

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“…The more general goal of verifying smart contracts in various senses has become too big an industry to survey here [31]. Jiao et al [23] and Ribeiro et al [28] verify programs written in a subset of Solidity with respect to a high-level description of the semantics, and Bhargavan et al [11] verify smart contracts written in Solidity by translating them to F ★ .…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A verified algebraic representation of cairo program execution

Avigad

Goldberg

Levit

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs

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Cryptographic interactive proof systems provide an efficient and scalable means of verifying the results of computation on blockchain. A prover constructs a proof, off-chain, that the execution of a program on a given input terminates with a certain result. The prover then publishes a certificate that can be verified efficiently and reliably modulo commonly accepted cryptographic assumptions. The method relies on an algebraic encoding of execution traces of programs. Here we report on a verification of the correctness of such an encoding of the Cairo model of computation with respect to the STARK interactive proof system, using the Lean 3 proof assistant.

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“…There is a glaring need for a safe mechanism to upgrade smart contracts in platforms, such as Ethereum, where contract implementations are immutable once deployed; the many surveys uncovering this fact [19,40,15] and communityproposed design patterns proposing mechanisms to upgrade smart contracts [38,10,25,32] attest this necessity. Yet, surprisingly, we could only find two close related approaches [11,35] that try to tackle this problem.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specification is Law: Safe Creation and Upgrade of Ethereum Smart Contracts

Antonino¹,

Juliandson²,

Sampaio³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Smart contracts are the building blocks of the "code is law" paradigm: the smart contract's code indisputably describes how its assets are to be managed -once it is created, its code is typically immutable. Faulty smart contracts present the most significant evidence against the practicality of this paradigm; they are well-documented and resulted in assets worth vast sums of money being compromised. To address this issue, the Ethereum community proposed (i) tools and processes to audit/analyse smart contracts, and (ii) design patterns implementing a mechanism to make contract code mutable. Individually, (i) and (ii) only partially address the challenges raised by the "code is law" paradigm. In this paper, we combine elements from (i) and (ii) to create a systematic framework that moves away from "code is law" and gives rise to a new "specification is law" paradigm. It allows contracts to be created and upgraded but only if they meet a corresponding formal specification. The framework is centered around a trusted deployer : an off-chain service that formally verifies and enforces this notion of conformance. We have prototyped this framework, and investigated its applicability to contracts implementing two widely used Ethereum standards: the ERC20 Token Standard and ERC1155 Multi Token Standard, with promising results.

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A Survey of Smart Contract Formal Specification and Verification

Cited by 137 publications

References 37 publications

Introduction of Formal Methods in Blockchain Consensus Mechanism and Its Associated Protocols

Introduction of Formal Methods in Blockchain Consensus Mechanism and Its Associated Protocols

A verified algebraic representation of cairo program execution

Specification is Law: Safe Creation and Upgrade of Ethereum Smart Contracts

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