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arXiv · 2208.02920

Deductive Verification of Smart Contracts with Dafny

Franck Cassez·Joanne Fuller·Horacio Mijail Anton Quiles
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Abstract

We present a methodology to develop verified smart contracts. We write smart contracts, their specifications and implementations in the verification-friendly language Dafny. In our methodology the ability to write specifications, implementations and to reason about correctness is a primary concern. We propose a simple, concise yet powerful solution to reasoning about contracts that have external calls. This includes arbitrary re-entrancy which is a major source of bugs and attacks in smart contracts. Although we do not yet have a compiler from Dafny to EVM bytecode, the results we obtain on the Dafny code can reasonably be assumed to hold on Solidity code: the translation of the Dafny code to Solidity is straightforward. As a result our approach can readily be used to develop and deploy safer contracts.

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Franck Cassez, Joanne Fuller, Horacio Mijail Anton Quiles. 2022-08-04. Deductive Verification of Smart Contracts with Dafny. https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.02920

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