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Smart Contracts: Application Scenarios for Deductive Program Verification

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Formal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops (FM 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12232))

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Abstract

Smart contracts are programs that run on a distributed ledger platform. They usually manage resources representing valuable assets. Moreover, their source code is visible to potential attackers, they are distributed, and bugs are hard to fix. Thus, they are susceptible to attacks exploiting programming errors. Their vulnerability makes a rigorous formal analysis of the functional correctness of smart contracts highly desirable.

In this short paper, we show that the architecture of smart contract platforms offers a computation model for smart contracts that yields itself naturally to deductive program verification. We discuss different classes of correctness properties of distributed ledger applications, and show that design-by-contract verification tools are suitable to prove these properties. We present experiments where we apply the KeY verification tool to smart contracts in the Hyperledger Fabric framework which are implemented in Java and specified using the Java Modeling Language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://chaincode.chainsecurity.com/.

  2. 2.

    Available at https://key-project.org/chaincode.

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Bernhard Beckert, Jonas Schiffl & Mattias Ulbrich

Authors
  1. Bernhard Beckert
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  2. Jonas Schiffl
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  3. Mattias Ulbrich
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jonas Schiffl .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Emil Sekerinski

  2. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Nelma Moreira

  3. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    José N. Oliveira

  4. Argo Ai, Munich, Germany

    Daniel Ratiu

  5. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Riccardo Guidotti

  6. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Marie Farrell

  7. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Matt Luckcuck

  8. University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Diego Marmsoler

  9. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    José Campos

  10. University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Troy Astarte

  11. Claude Bernard University, Lyon, France

    Laure Gonnord

  12. Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan

    Antonio Cerone

  13. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Luis Couto

  14. University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Brijesh Dongol

  15. University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Martin Kutrib

  16. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro Monteiro

  17. Airbus Operations S.A.S., Toulouse, France

    David Delmas

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Beckert, B., Schiffl, J., Ulbrich, M. (2020). Smart Contracts: Application Scenarios for Deductive Program Verification. In: Sekerinski, E., et al. Formal Methods. FM 2019 International Workshops. FM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12232. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54994-7_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54994-7_21

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-54993-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-54994-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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