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Enforcing Determinism of Java Smart Contracts

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12063))

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Abstract

Java is a high-level, well-known and powerful object-oriented language, with a large support library and a comfortable toolbelt. Hence, it has been proposed for writing smart contracts in blockchain. However, its support library is non-deterministic, which is a blocking issue for its application to smart contracts. This paper discusses the kind of (non-)determinism of the methods of the Java library and how a deterministic fragment of that library can be specified. It shows that some relevant parts are deterministic only under specific conditions on run-time values. It concludes with the description of an instrumentation, for the Takamaka blockchain, that enforces such conditions, statically or dynamically, reporting experiments with its implementation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Java also allows so-called special calls, such as , that start the look-up from a given static type; as well as calls embedded in closures, such as method references (corresponding to in Java bytecode). For simplicity, these calls are not discussed here, but our implementation deals with them.

  2. 2.

    These signatures are copy and paste from the library source code. For the use of generics, wildcards and in these signatures, we refer to  [13].

  3. 3.

    The Java bytecode of the smart contract will contain an instruction , or a similar one for a subtype of .

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Verona, Verona, Italy

    Fausto Spoto

Authors
  1. Fausto Spoto
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Correspondence to Fausto Spoto .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, USA

    Matthew Bernhard

  2. Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  3. Computer Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    L. Jean Camp

  4. Department of Computer Science, Georgetown University, Washington, WA, USA

    Shin'ichiro Matsuo

  5. Western Sydney University, Parramatta, Australia

    Alana Maurushat

  6. Maison du Nombre, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Peter B. Rønne

  7. Dipartimento di Matematica, University of Trento, Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

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Spoto, F. (2020). Enforcing Determinism of Java Smart Contracts. In: Bernhard, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12063. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_40

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-54454-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-54455-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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