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Verifying Solidity Smart Contracts via Communication Abstraction in SmartACE

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Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 13182))

Abstract

Solidity smart contract allow developers to formalize financial agreements between users. Due to their monetary nature, smart contracts have been the target of many high-profile attacks. Brute-force verification of smart contracts that maintain data for up to \(2^{160}\) users is intractable. In this paper, we present SmartACE, an automated framework for smart contract verification. To ameliorate the state explosion induced by large numbers of users, SmartACE implements local bundle abstractions that reduce verification from arbitrarily many users to a few representative users. To uncover deep bugs spanning multiple transactions, SmartACE employs a variety of techniques such as model checking, fuzzing, and symbolic execution. To illustrate the effectiveness of SmartACE, we verify several contracts from the popular OpenZeppelin library: an access-control policy and an escrow service. For each contract, we provide specifications in the Scribble language and apply fault injection to validate each specification. We report on our experience integrating Scribble with SmartACE, and describe the performance of SmartACE on each specification.

This work was supported, in part, by Individual Discovery Grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and a Ripple Fellowship. Jorge A. Navas was supported by NSF grant 1816936.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    One exception is which is always an explicit participant.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-contracts/

  3. 3.

    https://docs.scribble.codes/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Scott Wesley, Richard Trefler & Arie Gurfinkel

  2. MPI-SWS, Kaiserslautern and Saarbrücken, Germany

    Maria Christakis

  3. SRI International, Menlo Park, USA

    Jorge A. Navas

  4. ConsenSys, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Valentin Wüstholz

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  1. Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Bernd Finkbeiner

  2. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Thomas Wies

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Wesley, S., Christakis, M., Navas, J.A., Trefler, R., Wüstholz, V., Gurfinkel, A. (2022). Verifying Solidity Smart Contracts via Communication Abstraction in SmartACE. In: Finkbeiner, B., Wies, T. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13182. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94583-1_21

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