Formal Verification of Smart Contracts

Abstract

Ethereum is a framework for cryptocurrencies which uses blockchain technology to provide an open global computing platform, called the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). EVM executes bytecode on a simple stack machine. Programmers do not usually write EVM code; instead, they can program in a JavaScript-like language, called Solidity, that compiles to bytecode. Since the main purpose of EVM is to execute smart contracts that manage and transfer digital assets (called Ether), security is of paramount importance. However, writing secure smart contracts can be extremely difficult: due to the openness of Ethereum, both programs and pseudonymous users can call into the public methods of other programs, leading to potentially dangerous compositions of trusted and untrusted code. This risk was recently illustrated by an attack on TheDAO contract that exploited subtle details of the EVM semantics to transfer roughly $50M worth of Ether into the control of an attacker. In this paper, we outline a framework to analyze and verify both the runtime safety and the functional correctness of Ethereum contracts by translation to F , a functional programming language aimed at program verification.

Mechanising blockchain consensus

“…Various formal semantics of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and its contract language Solidity were implemented in Coq [17], Isabelle [16], F ⋆ [3], Idris [27], K [14], Why3 [9], and in custom tools for static and dynamic analysis [21].…”

Blockchain Enhanced Emission Trading Framework in Fashion Apparel Manufacturing Industry

“…New versions of blockchain technology implementation offer support for the implementation of smart contracts encoded in ledger's blocks [18], which implements different business rules that need to be verified and agreed upon by all peer nodes from the network. When a transaction arrives, each node updates its state based on the results obtained after running the smart contract.…”

SmartDEMAP: A Smart Contract Deployment and Management Platform

“…An earlier Solidity version had such a problem [9]. Formal verification [1,4] and automatic bug-finding [8] are other relevant research topics for SmartDEMAP. Research into these topics is relatively new and the developed tools are not in wide use and geared more towards trained professionals.…”

“…The restrictions are enforced by executing formal verifiers [1,4], compilers, automated bug-finders [8], or other development and code quality tools on smart contracts. Such restrictions could consist of a formal proof of some specified properties, enforcing a programming language, or requiring a negative result from an automatic bug finder.…”