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IELE: A Rigorously Designed Language and Tool Ecosystem for the Blockchain

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Formal Methods – The Next 30 Years (FM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11800))

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Abstract

This paper proposes IELE, an LLVM-style language, together with a tool ecosystem for implementing and formally reasoning about smart contracts on the blockchain. IELE was designed by specifying its semantics formally in the K framework. Its implementation, a IELE virtual machine (VM), as well as a formal verification tool for IELE smart contracts, were automatically generated from the formal specification. The automatically generated formal verification tool allows us to formally verify smart contracts without any gap between the verifier and the actual VM. A compiler from Solidity, the predominant high-level language for smart contracts, to IELE has also been (manually) implemented, so Ethereum contracts can now also be executed on IELE.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    IELE can be used in any Ethereum-style blockchain, where the cryptocurrency may be called differently. We use Ether throughout the paper for the sake of concreteness.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to IOHK (http://iohk.io) for funding the IELE project, as well as for insightful discussions, encouragements and constructive criticisms along the way. The work on the K framework and its tooling was supported in part by NSF grant CNS 16-19275 and by the United States Air Force and DARPA under Contract No. FA8750-18-C-0092.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA

    Theodoros Kasampalis, Yi Zhang & Grigore Roşu

  2. Runtime Verification, Urbana, USA

    Dwight Guth, Brandon Moore, Traian Florin Șerbănuță, Daniele Filaretti, Virgil Șerbănuță, Ralph Johnson & Grigore Roşu

  3. University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Traian Florin Șerbănuță

Authors
  1. Theodoros Kasampalis
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  2. Dwight Guth
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Correspondence to Theodoros Kasampalis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa, Italy

    Maurice H. ter Beek

  2. Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Annabelle McIver

  3. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    José N. Oliveira

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Kasampalis, T. et al. (2019). IELE: A Rigorously Designed Language and Tool Ecosystem for the Blockchain. In: ter Beek, M., McIver, A., Oliveira, J. (eds) Formal Methods – The Next 30 Years. FM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11800. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30942-8_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30942-8_35

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