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Verification-Led Smart Contracts

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11599))

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Abstract

Turing complete smart contract formalisms (e.g. Solidity) are conceptually appealing, but leave the door open to the problems of verifying completely arbitrary code, a task which can be of arbitrarily high complexity or can be undecidable. We argue that a more structured approach, in which smart contract families are designed ab initio with efficient verifiability in mind, provide a much more practical way forward. We emphasis that the boundary between on-chain and off-chain information, which must always be determined in an application specific manner, is crucial in determining the practicability of smart contract verification. We discuss the role of refinement technologies in breaking down the complexity of smart contract verification, and illustrate the argument using the Event-B formal modelling framework and Solidity as implementation vehicle.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In practice, the mathematics needs to be capable of being reasoned about by the reasoning tools within the Rodin toolset [30], which curtails the usable expressivity quite firmly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Richard Banach

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  1. Richard Banach
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Correspondence to Richard Banach .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Stirling University, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  2. Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  3. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Federico Pintore

  4. University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Peter B. Rønne

  5. University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

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Banach, R. (2020). Verification-Led Smart Contracts. In: Bracciali, A., Clark, J., Pintore, F., Rønne, P., Sala, M. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11599. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-43724-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-43725-1

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