Abstract
Smart contracts are computer code that runs in blockchain and expresses the rules of an agreement among parties. A bug in their code has major consequences, such as rule violations and security attacks. Smart contracts are immutable and cannot be easily replaced to patch a bug. To overcome these problems, there exist automatic static analyzers that find bugs before smart contracts are installed in blockchain. However, this off-chain verification is optional: programmers are not forced to use it. This paper defines on-chain verification instead, that occurs inside the same blockchain nodes, when the code of smart contracts is installed. It acts as a mandatory entry filter that bans code that does not abide to the verification rules, that are consequently part of the consensus rules of the blockchain. Thus, an improvement in on-chain verification entails a consensus update of the network. This paper provides an implementation of on-chain verification for smart contracts written in the Takamaka subset of Java, running as a Tendermint application. It shows that on-chain verification works, reporting actual experiments.
Work supported by FSE – Regione del Veneto: DGR N. 1463/2019, Innovazione e ricerca per un Veneto più competitivo – Assegni di ricerca anno 2019.
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Notes
- 1.
The response might also contain an instrumentation of the code, as it is the case for the Java subset for programming smart contracts called Takamaka, that we use in our implementation. This is irrelevant here and we refer the interested reader to [14].
- 2.
The index #0 refers to the first object created during the execution of a request. In general, a request can instantiate many objects, depending on the code that it executes. For simplicity, this example assumes that only one has been instantiated.
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@FromContract and, later, @Payable are Java annotations, that is, a mechanism for adding metadata information to source and compiled code. They are irrelevant for the code executor, but can be used by code analysis and instrumentation tools.
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git clone –branch wtsc21 https://github.com/Hotmoka/hotmoka.git.
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Olivieri, L., Spoto, F., Tagliaferro, F. (2021). On-Chain Smart Contract Verification over Tendermint. In: Bernhard, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021 International Workshops. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12676. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63958-0_28
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