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Tezla, an Intermediate Representation for Static Analysis of Michelson Smart Contracts

Authors João Santos Reis , Paul Crocker , Simão Melo de Sousa

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Program analysis
Keywords
  • Intermediate representation
  • Static analysis
  • Tezos blockchain
  • Michelson

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Abstract

This paper introduces Tezla, an intermediate representation of Michelson smart contracts that eases the design of static smart contract analysers. This intermediate representation uses a store and aims to preserve the semantics, flow and resource usage of the original smart contract. This enables properties like gas consumption to be statically verified. We provide an automated decompiler of Michelson smart contracts to Tezla. In order to support our claim about the adequacy of Tezla, we develop a static analyser that takes advantage of the Tezla representation of Michelson smart contracts to prove simple but non-trivial properties.

Cite As Get BibTex

João Santos Reis, Paul Crocker, and Simão Melo de Sousa. Tezla, an Intermediate Representation for Static Analysis of Michelson Smart Contracts. In 2nd Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains (FMBC 2020). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 84, pp. 4:1-4:12, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.FMBC.2020.4

Author Details

João Santos Reis
  • Release Lab, Nova-Lincs, University of Beira Interior, Portugal
Paul Crocker
  • Release Lab, C4, University of Beira Interior, Portugal
Simão Melo de Sousa
  • Release Lab, C4, Nova-Lincs, University of Beira Interior, Portugal

Funding

This work was supported and funded by the Tezos Foundation by the project FRESCO (Formal Verification of Tezos Smart Contracts).

Supplementary Materials

References

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