arXiv subjects

Maria A Schett

Publications and source records attributed to Maria A Schett.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Foundational Verification of Smart Contracts through Verified Compilation

Programs executed on a blockchain - smart contracts - have high financial stakes; their correctness is crucial. We argue, that this correctness needs to be foundational: correctness needs to be based on the operational semantics of their execution environment. In this work we present a foundational system - the DeepSEA system - targeting the Ethereum blockchain as the largest smart contract platform. The DeepSEA system has a small but sufficiently rich programming language amenable for verification, the DeepSEA language, and a verified DeepSEA compiler. Together they enable true end-to-end verification for smart contracts. We demonstrate usability through two case studies: a realistic contract for Decentralized Finance and contract for crowdfunding.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2021

Embedding a Deterministic BFT Protocol in a Block DAG

This work formalizes the structure and protocols underlying recent distributed systems leveraging block DAGs, which are essentially encoding Lamport's happened-before relations between blocks, as their core network primitives. We then present an embedding of any deterministic Byzantine fault tolerant protocol $\mathcal{P}$ to employ a block DAG for interpreting interactions between servers. Our main theorem proves that this embedding maintains all safety and liveness properties of $\mathcal{P}$. Technically, our theorem is based on the insight that a block DAG merely acts as an efficient reliable point-to-point channel between instances of P while also using $\mathcal{P}$ for efficient message compression.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

Blockchain Superoptimizer

In the blockchain-based, distributed computing platform Ethereum, programs called smart contracts are compiled to bytecode and executed on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Executing EVM bytecode is subject to monetary fees---a clear optimization target. Our aim is to superoptimize EVM bytecode by encoding the operational semantics of EVM instructions as SMT formulas and leveraging a constraint solver to automatically find cheaper bytecode. We implement this approach in our EVM Bytecode SuperOptimizer ebso and perform two large scale evaluations on real-world data sets.

cs.LO↗