Verifying Declarative Smart Contracts

Abstract

Smart contracts manage a large number of digital assets nowa-days. Bugs in these contracts have led to significant financial loss. Verifying the correctness of smart contracts is, therefore, an important task. This paper presents an automated safety verification tool, DCV, that targets declarative smart contracts written in De-Con, a logic-based domain-specific language for smart contract implementation and specification. DCV proves safety properties by mathematical induction and can automatically infer inductive invariants using heuristic patterns, without annotations from the developer. Our evaluation on 23 benchmark contracts shows that DCV is effective in verifying smart contracts adapted from public repositories, and can verify contracts not supported by other tools. Furthermore, DCV significantly outperforms baseline tools in verification time.