Trading Stocks on Blocks - Engineering Decentralized Markets

Notheisen, Benedikt; Gödde, Magnus; Weinhardt, Christof

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-59144-5_34

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…While many of these cryptocurrencies have an intentionally limited scripting language (e.g., Bitcoin [1]), Ethereum was designed from the ground up with a quasi Turing-complete language 1 . Ethereum programs, called smart contracts, have thus found a variety of appealing use cases, such as financial contracts [2], auctions [3], elections [4], data management systems [5], trading platforms [6,7], permission management [8] and verifiable cloud computing [9], just to mention a few. Given their financial nature, bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts may lead to catastrophic consequences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Semantic Framework for the Security Analysis of Ethereum Smart Contracts

Grishchenko

Maffei

Schneidewind

2018

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

242

217

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Smart contracts are programs running on cryptocurrency (e.g., Ethereum) blockchains, whose popularity stem from the possibility to perform financial transactions, such as payments and auctions, in a distributed environment without need for any trusted third party. Given their financial nature, bugs or vulnerabilities in these programs may lead to catastrophic consequences, as witnessed by recent attacks. Unfortunately, programming smart contracts is a delicate task that requires strong expertise: Ethereum smart contracts are written in Solidity, a dedicated language resembling JavaScript, and shipped over the blockchain in the EVM bytecode format. In order to rigorously verify the security of smart contracts, it is of paramount importance to formalize their semantics as well as the security properties of interest, in particular at the level of the bytecode being executed. In this paper, we present the first complete small-step semantics of EVM bytecode, which we formalize in the F* proof assistant, obtaining executable code that we successfully validate against the official Ethereum test suite. Furthermore, we formally define for the first time a number of central security properties for smart contracts, such as call integrity, atomicity, and independence from miner controlled parameters. This formalization relies on a combination of hyper-and safety properties. Along this work, we identified various mistakes and imprecisions in existing semantics and verification tools for Ethereum smart contracts, thereby demonstrating once more the importance of rigorous semantic foundations for the design of security verification techniques. ι.code [µ.pc] = ADD µ.s = a :: b :: s µ.gas ≥ 3 µ ′ = µ[s → (a + b) :: s][pc += 1][gas −= 3]

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Semantic Framework for the Security Analysis of Ethereum Smart Contracts

Grishchenko

Maffei

Schneidewind

2018

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

242

217

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“…In particular, they allow for the secure execution of payments, and more in general computations, among mutually distrustful parties. While some cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin [27] provide only a limited scripting language tailored to payments, others, like Ethereum [32], support a quasi Turing complete 1 smart contract language, allowing for advanced applications such as trading platforms [25,28], elections [26], permission management [7,11], data management systems [5,29], or auctions [13,17]. With the growing complexity of smart contracts, however, also the attack surface grows.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Pitfalls and Best Practices in Automated Sound Static Analysis of Ethereum Smart Contracts

Schneidewind,

Scherer,

Maffei

2021

Preprint

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Ethereum smart contracts are distributed programs running on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Since program flaws can cause significant monetary losses and can hardly be fixed due to the immutable nature of the blockchain, there is a strong need of automated analysis tools which provide formal security guarantees. Designing such analyzers, however, proved to be challenging and error-prone. We review the existing approaches to automated, sound, static analysis of Ethereum smart contracts and highlight prevalent issues in the state of the art. Finally, we overview eThor , a recent static analysis tool that we developed following a principled design and implementation approach based on rigorous semantic foundations to overcome the problems of past works.

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