Property-Based Automated Repair of DeFi Protocols

Abstract

Programming errors enable security attacks on smart contracts, which are used to manage large sums of financial assets. Automated program repair (APR) techniques aim to reduce developers' burden of manually fixing bugs by automatically generating patches for a given issue. Existing APR tools for smart contracts focus on mitigating typical smart contract vulnerabilities rather than violations of functional specification. However, in decentralized financial (DeFi) smart contracts, the inconsistency between intended behavior and implementation translates into the deviation from the underlying financial model, resulting in monetary losses for the application and its users. In this work, we propose DeFinery - a technique for automated repair of a smart contract that does not satisfy a user-defined correctness property. To explore a larger set of diverse patches while providing formal correctness guarantees w.r.t. the intended behavior, we combine search-based patch generation with semantic analysis of an original program for inferring its specification. Our experiments in repairing 9 real-world and benchmark smart contracts prove that DeFinery efficiently generates high-quality patches that cannot be found by other existing tools.