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An Idealist’s Approach for Smart Contract Correctness

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14308))

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Abstract

In this work, we experiment an idealistic approach for smart contract correctness verification and enforcement, based on the assumption that developers are either desired or required to provide a correctness specification due to the importance of smart contracts and the fact that they are immutable after deployment. We design a static verification system with a specification language which supports fully compositional verification (with the help of function specifications, contract invariants, loop invariants and call invariants). Our approach has been implemented in a tool named iContract which automatically proves the correctness of a smart contract statically or checks the unverified part of the specification during runtime. Using iContract, we have verified 10 high-profile smart contracts against manually developed detailed specifications, many of which are beyond the capacity of existing verifiers. Specially, we have uncovered two ERC20 violations in the BNB and QNT contracts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    deployed at BNB chain address 0x32b166e082993af6598a89397e82e123ca44e74e.

  2. 2.

    Note that runtime checking for arithmetic overflow has been introduced since Solidity 0.8 and thus no longer an issue.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

    Tai D. Nguyen, Long H. Pham & Jun Sun

  2. University College London, London, UK

    Quang Loc Le

Authors
  1. Tai D. Nguyen
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  2. Long H. Pham
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  3. Jun Sun
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  4. Quang Loc Le
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tai D. Nguyen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Yi Li

  2. Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Sofiène Tahar

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Nguyen, T.D., Pham, L.H., Sun, J., Le, Q.L. (2023). An Idealist’s Approach for Smart Contract Correctness. In: Li, Y., Tahar, S. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14308. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7584-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7584-6_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-99-7583-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-7584-6

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