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A refinement-based approach to safe smart contract deployment and evolution

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Abstract

In our previous work, we proposed a verification framework that shifts from the “code is law” to a new “specification is law” paradigm related to the safe evolution of smart contracts. The framework proposed there relaxed the well-established requirement that, once a smart contract is deployed in a blockchain, its code is expected to be immutable. More flexibly, contracts are allowed to be created and upgraded provided they meet a corresponding formal specification that was fixed. In the current paper, we extend this framework to allow specifications to evolve, provided a refinement notion is preserved. We propose a notion of specification refinement tailored for smart contracts and a methodology for checking it. In addition to weakening preconditions and strengthening postconditions and invariants, we allow for the change of data representation and interface extension. Thus, we are able to reason about a significantly wider class of smart contract evolution histories, when contrasted with the original framework. The new framework is centred around a trusted deployer: an off-chain service that formally verifies and enforces the notions of implementation conformance and specification refinement. We have investigated its applicability to the safe deployment and upgrade of contracts implementing widely used Ethereum standards (the ERC20 Token Standard, the ERC3156 Flash Loans, the ERC1155 Multi Token Standard and The ERC721 standard for Non-Fungible Tokens); we handle evolutions possibly involving changes in data representation and interface extensions.

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Notes

  1. In fact, the function send also delegates control to msg.sender but it does in such a restricted way that it cannot perform any relevant computation. So, for the purpose of this paper and to simplify our exposition, we ignore this delegation.

  2. Typically, specifications might involved user-defined types such as structs and enumerations. For the sake of conciseness and generality, our specification definition omits the explicit declaration of such types and assume that the types used in a specification, even when user-defined, are well known.

  3. Recall that the interface I is a mapping from function names to their signatures defined by a pair of sequences: one for the input parameters and the other for the output parameters, with their types. So we use the notation \(n \mapsto (in, outs)\) to represent a maplet of the interface I.

  4. The function verify-upgrade can be optimised as follows. Unlike \(\textit{verify-creation}\), this function can assume that the constructor’s obligations have been met. The constructor is only executed at contract-creation time. The upgrade process need only to check for conformance for the implementation of the (non-constructor) public functions.

  5. We are assuming that the constructor function has no parameters for the sake of simplicity. Our framework could easily be adapted to include such parameters, but also, given that this function is only called once, its expected arguments could be hardcoded into the constructor code turning it into a function without parameters.

  6. https://github.com/formalblocks/safeevolutionrefinement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Blockhouse Technology Limited, Oxford, UK

    Pedro Antonino & A. W. Roscoe

  2. Centro de Informática, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil

    Juliandson Ferreira, Augusto Sampaio & Filipe Arruda

  3. Department of Computer Science, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    A. W. Roscoe

  4. University College Oxford Blockchain Research Centre, Oxford, UK

    A. W. Roscoe

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  1. Pedro Antonino
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Antonino, P., Ferreira, J., Sampaio, A. et al. A refinement-based approach to safe smart contract deployment and evolution. Softw Syst Model (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-023-01143-z

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