2018/09/26 by Dominik Harz, Harz, Dominik, William J. Knottenbelt +1 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Cryptography and Data Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Security and Verification in Computing
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1809.09805
openalex publication_date 2018/09/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With a market capitalisation of over USD 205 billion in just under ten years, public distributed ledgers have experienced significant adoption. Apart from novel consensus mechanisms, their success is also accountable to smart contracts. These programs allow distrusting parties to enter agreements that are executed autonomously. However, implementation issues in smart contracts caused severe losses to the users of such contracts. Significant efforts are taken to improve their security by introducing new programming languages and advance verification methods. We provide a survey of those efforts in two parts. First, we introduce several smart contract languages focussing on security features. To that end, we present an overview concerning paradigm, type, instruction set, semantics, and metering. Second, we examine verification tools and methods for smart contract and distributed ledgers. Accordingly, we introduce their verification approach, level of automation, coverage, and supported languages. Last, we present future research directions including formal semantics, verified compilers, and automated verification.