VeriSolid: Correct-by-Design Smart Contracts for Ethereum

Abstract

The adoption of blockchain based distributed ledgers is growing fast due to their ability to provide reliability, integrity, and auditability without trusted entities. One of the key capabilities of these emerging platforms is the ability to create self-enforcing smart contracts. However, the development of smart contracts has proven to be error-prone in practice, and as a result, contracts deployed on public platforms are often riddled with security vulnerabilities. This issue is exacerbated by the design of these platforms, which forbids updating contract code and rolling back malicious transactions. In light of this, it is crucial to ensure that a smart contract is secure before deploying it and trusting it with significant amounts of cryptocurrency. To this end, we introduce the VeriSolid framework for the formal verification of contracts that are specified using a transition-system based model with rigorous operational semantics. Our model-based approach allows developers to reason about and verify contract behavior at a high level of abstraction. VeriSolid allows the generation of Solidity code from the verified models, which enables the correct-by-design development of smart contracts.

Formal Verification of Functional Requirements for Smart Contract Compositions in Supply Chain Management Systems

“…Mavridou et al [14] developed the VeriSolid framework as a model-based, correct-by-design approach for Ethereum Solidity smart contracts. VeriSolid can be used as a tool by smart contract developers to manually specify their requirements in the abstract form of finite state machines (FSMs).VeriSolid extracts the behavioral model of the contract from the given FSMs using the Behavior Interaction Priority (BIP) tool [15].…”

“…Bhargavan et al [9] introduce a novel framework for detecting flaws in Ethereum smart contract code by translating Solidity and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode contracts into the functional programming language F*. The aforementioned approaches [9][10][11]13,14] are solely focused on a single smart contract. In contrast, our paper investigates Page 5279 verifying the functional compliance of interacting smart contracts deployed in the Hyperledger Fabric platform and written in the GO language.…”

“…We represent each smart contract as a finite state machine (FSM), which comprises a set of states and a set of transitions between those states. To model a Hyperledger Fabric smart contract as an FSM, we apply a minimum set of rules [14] to simplify the overall process and reduce the errors. The rules include the following.…”

An Empirical Study Into the Success of Listed Smart Contracts in Ethereum

“…Current methods of dealing with this are patchwork and it is advisable to look for new solutions. For example, a developer must make sure that he fully understands the risks of splitting a contract in an immutable "front-end" contract and a "back-end" library [19] that can be potentially updated. To alleviate negative consequences of buggy "backend" updates might be to deploy unit tests along with a smart contract application, while the smart contract platform itself could enforce the new updates of the libraries to pass all unit tests of the "front-end" smart contract.…”

Cyber-physical simulation platform for security assessment of transactive energy systems

“…By design, the security of this value transfer is guaranteed by the interaction protocol itself and obviates the need for trusted transaction intermediaries. The execution of smart contracts (i.e., code that captures the market logic and participants' roles) is automated and guaranteed [15], [16]. Additionally, the blockchain constitutes an immutable, complete, and fully auditable record of all transactions that have occurred within the system.…”