Overview of the Languages for Safe Smart Contract Programming

Abstract

Blockchain technologies are gradually being found an application in many areas, especially in FinTech. As a result, a lot of blockchain platforms have emerged with the support of smart contracts that are intended to automate party interactions. However, it has been shown that they are prone to attacks and errors which lead to money loss. To date, there has been a wide range of approaches for making smart contracts safer that included analysis tools, reasoning models, and safer and more rigorous programming languages. In this paper, we provide an overview of smart contract programming languages design principles, related vulnerabilities, and future research areas. The provided overview is meant to outline the to date state of languages and to become a possible basis for future proceedings, and show approaches, used by the community, to reach safe and usable language for smart contracts. We have split all found vulnerabilities by source of their arising. Various languages' characteristics such as abstraction level, paradigm, Turing completeness and main features are summarized in the table. Additional information about languages is provided, e.g. model of execution and tools for static analysis.

Smart Contracts Security Threats and Solutions

“…Logic-based languages (Prolog) (Zibin et al, 2019;Florian et al, 2016). IELE (Scillia, Yul) (Tyurin & al., 2019). Use of type based-language Idris, Simplicity (O'Connor R., 2017).…”

“…Several approaches are then proposed to ease smart contract development: Logic-based languages (Prolog) (Zibin et al, 2019;Florian et al, 2016), IELE (Scillia, Yul) (Tyurin & al., 2019), Use of type based-language Idris, Simplicity (O'Connor R., 2017), liquidity (Çagdas & al., 2018), Obsidian (Coblenz, 2017), Flint (Schrans & al., 2018), Mandala (Markus, 2019) SmaCoNat (Regnath & Steinhors ., 2018), Bitml (Tyurin & al., 2019), SPESC (Xiao & al., 2018), iContract (Qasse & al., 20201), Smart-Graph (Pierro., 2021), and SuMo (Barboni & al., 2021).…”

“…Secondly, from a smart contracts point of view, the right coding is paramount as money is involved in most systems. This study provides different ways, such as the use of appropriate guidelines and Logic-based languages (Prolog) (Zibin et al, 2019;Florian et al, 2016), IELE (Scillia, Yul) (Tyurin & al., 2019), and the use of type based-language, to name a few, to ensure an error-free smart contract with more straightforward writing language. They all help develop smart contracts and ease smart contract development.…”

“…Smart contracts embrace all domains, and several languages have been created to ease contract creation. A thorough study of these languages will help emphasize the easiest and least prone to artificial error to be used in a particular domain, such as the health care system (Tyurin & al., 2019). Further investigation can consider Turing's complete contract language limitation, mainly used to develop smart contracts (Marc & al., 2019) to improve its effectiveness.…”

SCEditor: A Graphical Editor Prototype for Smart Contract Design and Development

“…Despite recent advancements in the SC programming languages, they still have a lot of problems to overcome, and several concerns continue to undermine their adoption. For example, Vyper does not support Inheritance, Inline Assembly, Function and Operator Overloading, Recurring Calls, etc [18], [19]. A significant challenge that developers encounter in the Ethereum platform is the dilemma of deploying code to a system that is immutable while the development platform itself continues to evolve.…”