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.
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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!
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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
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