SEMANTIC APPROACH TO SMART CONTRACT VERIFICATION

Abstract

Vulnerabilities of smart contract are certainly one of the limiting factors for wider adoption of blockchain technology. Smart contracts written in Solidity language are considered due to common adoption of the Ethereum blockchain platform. Despite its popularity, the semantics of the language is not completely documented and relies on implicit mechanisms not publicly available and as such vulnerable to possible attacks. In addition, creating formal semantics for the higher-level language provides support to verification mechanisms. In this paper, a novel approach to smart contact verification is presented that uses ontologies in order to leverage semantic annotations of the smart contract source code combined with semantic representation of domain-specific aspects. The following aspects of smart contracts, apart from source code are taken into consideration for verification: business logic, domain knowledge, run-time state changes and expert knowledge about vulnerabilities. Main advantages of the proposed verification approach are platform independence and extendability.