Multilevel Contracts for Trusted Components

This article contributes to the design and the verification of trusted components and services. The contracts are declined at several levels to cover then different facets, such as component consistency, compatibility or correctness. The article introduces multilevel contracts and a design+verification process for handling and analysing these contracts in component models. The approach is implemented with the COSTO platform that supports the Kmelia component model. A case study illustrates the overall approach.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

FLACOS’08 Workshop proceedings

The 2nd Workshop on Formal Languages and Analysis of Contract-Oriented Software (FLACOS’08) is held in Malta. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on language-based solutions to contract-oriented software development. The workshop is partially funded by the Nordunet3 project “COSoDIS” (Contract-Oriented Software Development for Internet Services) and it attracted 25 participants. The program consists of 4 regular papers and 10 invited participant presentations

Towards Safer Smart Contracts: A Survey of Languages and Verification Methods

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