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SMT-Based Verification of Solidity Smart Contracts

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice (ISoLA 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11247))

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Abstract

Ethereum smart contracts are programs that run inside a public distributed database called a blockchain. These smart contracts are used to handle tokens of value, can be accessed and analyzed by everyone and are immutable once deployed. Those characteristics make it imperative that smart contracts are bug-free at deployment time, hence the need to verify them formally. In this paper we describe our current efforts in building an SMT-based formal verification module within the compiler of Solidity, a popular language for writing smart contracts. The tool is seamlessly integrated into the compiler, where during compilation, the user is automatically warned of and given counterexamples for potential arithmetic overflow/underflow, unreachable code, trivial conditions, and assertion fails. We present how the component currently translates a subset of Solidity into SMT statements using different theories, and discuss future challenges such as multi-transaction and state invariants.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As opposed to require, assert will result in all remaining gas to be consumed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ethereum Foundation, Berlin, Germany

    Leonardo Alt & Christian Reitwiessner

Authors
  1. Leonardo Alt
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  2. Christian Reitwiessner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christian Reitwiessner .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Alt, L., Reitwiessner, C. (2018). SMT-Based Verification of Solidity Smart Contracts. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice. ISoLA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11247. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03426-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03427-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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