Honesty by typing

We propose a type system for a calculus of contracting processes. Processes may stipulate contracts, and then either behave honestly, by keeping the promises made, or not. Type safety guarantees that a typeable process is honest - that is, the process abides by the contract it has stipulated in all possible contexts, even those containing dishonest adversaries

Safer in the Clouds (Extended Abstract)

We outline the design of a framework for modelling cloud computing systems.The approach is based on a declarative programming model which takes the form of a lambda-calculus enriched with suitable mechanisms to express and enforce application-level security policies governing usages of resources available in the clouds. We will focus on the server side of cloud systems, by adopting a pro-active approach, where explicit security policies regulate server's behaviour.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2010, arXiv:1010.530

Model checking usage policies

We study usage automata, a formal model for specifying policies on the usage of resources. Usage automata extend finite state automata with some additional features, parameters and guards, that improve their expressivity. We show that usage automata are expressive enough to model policies of real-world applications. We discuss their expressive power, and we prove that the problem of telling whether a computation complies with a usage policy is decidable. The main contribution of this paper is a model checking technique for usage automata. The model is that of usages, i.e. basic processes that describe the possible patterns of resource access and creation. In spite of the model having infinite states, because of recursion and resource creation, we devise a polynomial-time model checking technique for deciding when a usage complies with a usage policy

Formal Models of Bitcoin Contracts: A Survey

Although Bitcoin is mostly used as a decentralized application to transfer cryptocurrency, over the last 10 years there have been several studies on how to exploit Bitcoin to execute smart contracts. These are computer protocols which allow users to exchange bitcoins according to complex pre-agreed rules. Some of these studies introduce formal models of Bitcoin contracts, which specify their behavior in non-ambiguous terms, in some cases providing tools to automatically verify relevant contract properties. In this paper, we survey the formal models proposed in the scientific literature, comparing their expressiveness and applicability in the wild

Modelling and verifying contract-oriented systems in Maude

We address the problem of modelling and verifying contractoriented systems, wherein distributed agents may advertise and stipulate contracts, but — differently from most other approaches to distributed agents — are not assumed to always behave “honestly”. We describe an executable specification in Maude of the semantics of CO2, a calculus for contract-oriented systems [6]. The honesty property [5] characterises those agents which always respect their contracts, in all possible execution contexts. Since there is an infinite number of such contexts, honesty cannot be directly verified by model-checking the state space of an agent (indeed, honesty is an undecidable property in general [5]). The main contribution of this paper is a sound verification technique for honesty. To do that, we safely over-approximate the honesty property by abstracting from the actual contexts a process may be engaged with. Then, we develop a model-checking technique for this abstraction, we describe an implementation in Maude, and we discuss some experiments with it

Contested novel ecosystems: Socio-ecological processes and evidence from Italy

In the context of contemporary global climate and environmental change, both natural and social scientists have stressed the role green areas play in global warming adaptation strategies and in improving the healthiness of the urban environment. Indeed, in recent years these spaces have become central to institutional political debates and various policies have been designed for their valorization. However, little attention has been paid to rewilded urban spaces, recently defined as novel urban ecosystems, and to their socio-ecological complexity. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that links natural and social science perspectives, this article aims to highlight the role of novel urban ecosystems in the reconfiguration of urban policies. Indeed, this contribution analyzes ecosystem services coupled with the hybrid, contested socio-ecological nature of four case studies in Italy characterized by grassroots socio-environmental mobilization. Data were collected through comparative quantitative and qualitative methods. The evidence shows that the specific ecological features of novel urban ecosystems are strategic in terms of actual and potential ecosystem service provision for cities and suggests that citizens play a fundamental role in recognizing and valorizing them. In parallel, these spaces, reconceptualized as contested novel ecosystems, emerge as controversial hybrid urban socio-natures that enable community empowerment and produce a heterogeneous, grassroots political space oriented towards urban commons and environmental-climate justice

Designing Secure Ethereum Smart Contracts: A Finite State Machine Based Approach

The adoption of blockchain-based distributed computation platforms is growing fast. Some of these platforms, such as Ethereum, provide support for implementing smart contracts, which are envisioned to have novel applications in a broad range of areas, including finance and Internet-of-Things. However, a significant number of smart contracts deployed in practice suffer from security vulnerabilities, which enable malicious users to steal assets from a contract or to cause damage. Vulnerabilities present a serious issue since contracts may handle financial assets of considerable value, and contract bugs are non-fixable by design. To help developers create more secure smart contracts, we introduce FSolidM, a framework rooted in rigorous semantics for designing con- tracts as Finite State Machines (FSM). We present a tool for creating FSM on an easy-to-use graphical interface and for automatically generating Ethereum contracts. Further, we introduce a set of design patterns, which we implement as plugins that developers can easily add to their contracts to enhance security and functionality

Debits and Credits in Petri Nets and Linear Logic

Exchanging resources often involves situations where a participant gives a resource without obtaining immediately the expected reward. For instance, one can buy an item without paying it in advance, but contracting a debt which must be eventually honoured. Resources, credits and debits can be represented, either implicitly or explicitly, in several formal models, among which Petri nets and linear logic. In this paper we study the relations between two of these models, namely intuitionistic linear logic with mix and Debit Petri nets. In particular, we establish a natural correspondence between provability in the logic, and marking reachability in nets

Vicious circles in contracts and in logic

Contracts are formal promises on the future interactions of participants, which describe the causal dependencies among their actions. An inherent feature of contracts is that such dependencies may be circular: for instance, a buyer promises to pay for an item if the seller promises to ship it, and vice versa. We establish a bridge between two formal models for contracts, one based on games over event structures, and the other one on Propositional Contract Logic. In particular, we show that winning strategies in the game-theoretic model correspond to proofs in the logi

A Formal Model of Algorand Smart Contracts

We develop a formal model of Algorand stateless smart contracts (stateless ASC1). We exploit our model to prove fundamental properties of the Algorand blockchain, and to establish the security of some archetypal smart contracts. While doing this, we highlight various design patterns supported by Algorand. We perform experiments to validate the coherence of our formal model w.r.t. the actual implementation