Abstract
Smart contracts—shared stateful reactive objects stored on a blockchain—are widely employed nowadays for mediating exchanges of crypto-currency between multiple untrusted parties. Despite a lot of attention given by the formal methods community to the notion of smart contract correctness, only a few efforts targeted their lifetime properties. In this paper, we focus on reasoning about execution traces of smart contracts. We report on our preliminary results of mechanically verifying some of such properties by embedding a smart contract language into the Coq proof assistant. We also discuss several common scenarios, all of which require multi-step blockchain-based arbitration and thus must be implemented via stateful contracts, and discuss possible temporal specifications of the corresponding smart contract implementations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
At the moment of this writing, the contract still holds approximately 0.043 ETH.
- 2.
For the full specification of Scilla syntax and runnable contract examples, please, refer to http://scilla-lang.org.
- 3.
The mechanised embedding of a subset of Scilla into Coq is publicly available for downloads and experiments: https://github.com/ilyasergey/scilla-coq.
- 4.
All definitions, theorems and proofs are in the accompanying Coq development.
- 5.
That is, there might be bugs in the code, and we invite the reader to find them!
References
BlockKing contract (2016). https://etherscan.io/address/0x3ad14db4e5a658d8d20f8836deabe9d5286f79e1
Alois, J.: Ethereum Parity Hack May Impact ETH 500,000 or \$146 Million (2017). https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2017/11/124200-ethereum-parity-hack-may-impact-eth-500000-146-million/
Atzei, N., Bartoletti, M., Cimoli, T.: A survey of attacks on ethereum smart contracts (SoK). In: Maffei, M., Ryan, M. (eds.) POST 2017. LNCS, vol. 10204, pp. 164–186. Springer, Heidelberg (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54455-6_8
Bamboo (2017). https://github.com/pirapira/bamboo
Bansal, K., Koskinen, E., Tripp, O.: Automatic generation of precise and useful commutativity conditions. In: Beyer, D., Huisman, M. (eds.) TACAS 2018. LNCS, vol. 10805, pp. 115–132. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89960-2_7
Chen, T., Li, X., Luo, X., Zhang, X.: Under-optimized smart contracts devour your money. In: SANER, pp. 442–446. IEEE (2017)
Coq Development Team: The Coq Proof Assistant Reference Manual - Version 8.8 (2018). http://coq.inria.fr/
Coquand, T., Huet, G.P.: The calculus of constructions. Inf. Comput. 76(2/3), 95–120 (1988)
del Castillo, M.: The DAO attack, 16 June 2016
Delmolino, K., Arnett, M., Kosba, A., Miller, A., Shi, E.: Step by step towards creating a safe smart contract: lessons and insights from a cryptocurrency lab. In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P.Y.A., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds.) FC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9604, pp. 79–94. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_6
Grossman, S.: Online detection of effectively callback free objects with applications to smart contracts. PACMPL 2(POPL), 48:1–48:28 (2018)
Halpern, J.Y., Moses, Y.: Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment. J. ACM 37(3), 549–587 (1990)
Kalra, S., Goel, S., Dhawan, M., Sharma, S.: ZEUS: analyzing safety of smart contracts. In: NDSS (2018)
Lamport, L.: “Sometime” is sometimes “not never” - on the temporal logic of programs. In: POPL, pp. 174–185. ACM Press (1980)
Lamport, L.: The part-time parliament. ACM TOPLAS 16(2), 133–169 (1998)
Leroy, X.: Formal certification of a compiler back-end or: programming a compiler with a proof assistant. In: POPL, pp. 42–54. ACM (2006)
Mavridou, A., Laszka, A.: Tool demonstration: FSolidM for designing secure ethereum smart contracts. In: Bauer, L., Küsters, R. (eds.) POST 2018. LNCS, vol. 10804, pp. 270–277. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89722-6_11
Nikolic, I., Kolluri, A., Sergey, I., Saxena, P., Hobor, A.: Finding the greedy, prodigal, and suicidal contracts at scale. CoRR, abs/1802.06038 (2018)
Obsidian (2018). https://mcoblenz.github.io/Obsidian
Peyton Jones, S.L.: The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River (1987)
Pnueli, A.: The temporal logic of programs. In: FOCS, pp. 46–57. IEEE Computer Society (1977)
Sabry, A., Felleisen, M.: Reasoning about programs in continuation-passing style. Lisp Symb. Comput. 6(3–4), 289–360 (1993)
Sergey, I., Hobor, A.: A concurrent perspective on smart contracts. In: 1st Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (2017)
Sergey, I., Kumar, A., Hobor, A.: Scilla: a smart contract intermediate-level language (2018). https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00687
Sirer, E.G.: Reentrancy woes in smart contracts, 13 July 2016
Solidity: a contract-oriented, high-level language for implementing smart contracts (2018)
Wood, G.: Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger (2014). https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sergey, I., Kumar, A., Hobor, A. (2018). Temporal Properties of 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_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03426-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03427-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)