A Hybrid Formal Verification System in Coq for Ensuring the Reliability and Security of Ethereum-based Service Smart Contracts

TL;DR

This paper introduces FSPVM-E, a Coq-based hybrid formal verification system that symbolically executes and verifies Ethereum smart contracts at the source code level, enhancing security and reliability assurance.

Contribution

It presents the first Coq-implemented hybrid formal verification system for Solidity source code smart contracts, combining symbolic execution with theorem proving.

Findings

Supports ERC20 token standard verification

Automatically detects vulnerabilities in smart contracts

Ensures correctness of the verification components

Abstract

This paper reports on the development of a formal symbolic process virtual machine (FSPVM) denoted as FSPVM-E for verifying the reliability and security of Ethereum-based services at the source code level of smart contracts, and a Coq proof assistant is employed for both programming the system and for proving its correctness. The current version of FSPVM-E adopts execution-verification isomorphism, which is an application extension of Curry-Howard isomorphism, as its fundamental theoretical framework to combine symbolic execution and higher-order logic theorem proving. The four primary components of FSPVM-E include a general, extensible, and reusable formal memory framework, an extensible and universal formal intermediate programming language denoted as Lolisa, which is a large subset of the Solidity programming language using generalized algebraic datatypes, the corresponding formally verified interpreter of Lolisa, denoted as FEther, and assistant tools and libraries. The self-correctness of all components is certified in Coq. Currently, FSPVM-E supports the ERC20 token standard, and can automatically and symbolically execute Ethereum-based smart contracts, scan their standard vulnerabilities, and verify their reliability and security properties with Hoare-style logic in Coq. To the best of authors' knowledge, the present work represents the first hybrid formal verification system implemented in Coq for Ethereum smart contracts that is applied at the Solidity source code level.