Deductive Verification of Smart Contracts (Invited Talk)

Abstract

At the core of the Ethereum network is the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) which can execute programs written in EVM bytecode. This remarkable feature empowers users to define complex business logic that can be executed programmatically by programs called smart contracts. Smart contracts are programs and may contain bugs. There are several examples of smart contract vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the past: in 2016, a re-entrance vulnerability in the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) smart contract was exploited to steal more than USD50 Million. The total value netted from DeFi hacks in 2023 is estimated to be more than $1.5 billion. In this talk I will discuss formal verification of smart contracts. The main technique is deductive verification supported by the verification-friendly language Dafny. I will show how we can use deductive verification to reason about smart contracts, from high-level specifications (Dafny), to intermediate representation (Yul) and finally low-level EVM bytecode.