A Generalized Formal Semantic Framework for Smart Contracts

Abstract

Smart contracts can be regarded as one of the most popular blockchain-based applications. The decentralized nature of the blockchain introduces vulnerabilities absent in other programs. Furthermore, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to patch a smart contract after it has been deployed. Therefore, smart contracts must be formally verified before they are deployed on the blockchain to avoid attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities. There is a recent surge of interest in analyzing and verifying smart contracts. While most of the existing works either focus on EVM bytecode or translate Solidity contracts into programs in intermediate languages for analysis and verification, we believe that a direct executable formal semantics of the high-level programming language of smart contracts is necessary to guarantee the validity of the verification. In this work, we propose a generalized formal semantic framework based on a general semantic model of smart contracts. Furthermore, this framework can directly handle smart contracts written in different high-level programming languages through semantic extensions and facilitates the formal verification of security properties with the generated semantics.

Detecting functional and security‐related issues in smart contracts: A systematic literature review

“…Other programming languages are rarely targeted by the state‐of‐the‐art approaches: 3 studies (i.e., 4.5%) targeted Vyper, 44,83,84 but they also target Solidity as well; 3 studies target the Bitcoin scripting language 85–87 . Only the approach proposed by Jiao et al 84 uses a programming language different from the ones provided in our framework. Such a programming language is Bamboo, 88 a language less popular than the alternatives for Ethereum SCs.…”

“…40,45,53,55,72,82 Other programming languages are rarely targeted by the state-of-the-art approaches: 3 studies (i.e., 4.5%) targeted Vyper, 44,83,84 but they also target Solidity as well; 3 studies target the Bitcoin scripting language. [85][86][87] Only the approach proposed by Jiao et al 84 uses a programming language different from the ones provided in our framework. Such a programming language is Bamboo, 88 a language less popular than the alternatives for Ethereum SCs.…”

Towards automated verification of smart contract fairness

“…Hildenbrandt et al presented an executable formal semantics for the Ethereum platform, named KEVM [27], based on which, Park et al [46] presented a deductive verification tool, capable of verifying various high-profile and safety-critical contracts. Jiao et al developed the operational formal semantics for the Solidity programming language, named K-Solidity [32,33]. Abdellatif et al [7] formalized blockchain and users' behaviors to verify properties about their interactions using statistical model checking.…”

SCMTool: A Graphical Tool for Smart Contract Modeling

“…As a result, contract developers are faced with a series of challenges, making the activity complex and error-prone, for both experienced and novice developers [Jurgelaitis et al 2022, Ferreira et al 2020. This represents a barrier to the formation of new developers in the field due to the high learning curve [Garamvölgyi et al 2018, Jiao et al 2020. For nontechnical users, understanding contracts can be challenging due to the difficulty in understanding the connection between elements and available resources, as there is no clear way to visually present a contract's functionalities and relationships [Qasse et al 2021].…”