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DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.FMBC.2026.6

Deductive Verification of SmartML Smart Contracts with KeY

Authors: Tudor Christian Balan, Wolfram Pfeifer, and Adele Veschetti

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 142, 7th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains (FMBC 2026)

Abstract

Unintended behavior in smart contracts can lead to major financial losses. Due to the immutable nature of blockchains, it is of utmost importance to ensure the functional correctness of smart contracts before deployment. Formal verification is a powerful technology for such critical applications, as it can show the absence of errors. Current approaches focus on verifying programs on specific blockchains, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Consequently, the SmartML smart contract modeling language was developed to design smart contracts independently of any particular blockchain. In this work, we present a novel approach for formally verifying SmartML contracts via an automatic translation to Java Card and the Java Modeling Language (JML). We extend SmartML with SmartJML, a JML-like specification language, and describe how SmartML and SmartJML can be automatically translated into Java Card and JML. With this, the established deductive verification tool KeY can be used for conducting proofs on the generated Java Card program. The faithfulness of our translation ensures that the obtained guarantees hold for the original SmartML models. In addition to the theoretical work, we provide a prototypical implementation of the automatic translation and evaluate it with a case study of an escrow.

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Tudor Christian Balan, Wolfram Pfeifer, and Adele Veschetti. Deductive Verification of SmartML Smart Contracts with KeY. In 7th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains (FMBC 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 142, pp. 6:1-6:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{balan_et_al:OASIcs.FMBC.2026.6,
  author =	{Balan, Tudor Christian and Pfeifer, Wolfram and Veschetti, Adele},
  title =	{{Deductive Verification of SmartML Smart Contracts with KeY}},
  booktitle =	{7th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Blockchains (FMBC 2026)},
  pages =	{6:1--6:16},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-424-6},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{142},
  editor =	{Bartoletti, Massimo and Marmsoler, Diego},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.FMBC.2026.6},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-257030},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.FMBC.2026.6},
  annote =	{Keywords: Formal Verification, Deductive Verification, Smart Contract Verification}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.Gabbrielli.2

A Formal Analysis of the Bitcoin Protocol

Authors: Cosimo Laneve and Adele Veschetti

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 86, Recent Developments in the Design and Implementation of Programming Languages (2020)

Abstract

We study Nakamoto’s Bitcoin protocol that implements a distributed ledger on peer-to-peer asynchronous networks. In particular, we define a principled formal model of key participants - the miners - as stochastic processes and describe the whole system as a parallel composition of miners. We therefore compute the probability that ledgers turn into a state with more severe inconsistencies, e.g. with longer forks, under the assumptions that messages are not lost and nodes are not hostile. We also study how the presence of hostile nodes mining blocks in wrong positions impacts on the consistency of the ledgers. Our theoretical results agree with the simulations performed on a probabilistic model checker that we extended with dynamic datatypes in order to have a faithful description of miners' behaviour.

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Cosimo Laneve and Adele Veschetti. A Formal Analysis of the Bitcoin Protocol. In Recent Developments in the Design and Implementation of Programming Languages. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 86, pp. 2:1-2:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@InProceedings{laneve_et_al:OASIcs.Gabbrielli.2,
  author =	{Laneve, Cosimo and Veschetti, Adele},
  title =	{{A Formal Analysis of the Bitcoin Protocol}},
  booktitle =	{Recent Developments in the Design and Implementation of Programming Languages},
  pages =	{2:1--2:17},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-171-9},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{86},
  editor =	{de Boer, Frank S. and Mauro, Jacopo},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.Gabbrielli.2},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-132242},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.Gabbrielli.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: Bitcoin, Distributed consensus, Distributed ledgers, Blockchain, PRISM, forks}
}

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Deductive Verification of SmartML Smart Contracts with KeY

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A Formal Analysis of the Bitcoin Protocol

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