Towards automated verification of smart contract fairness

Abstract

Smart contracts are computer programs allowing users to define and execute transactions automatically on top of the blockchain platform. Many of such smart contracts can be viewed as games. A game-like contract accepts inputs from multiple participants, and upon ending, automatically derives an outcome while distributing assets according to some predefined rules. Without clear understanding of the game rules, participants may suffer from fraudulent advertisements and financial losses. In this paper, we present a framework to perform (semi-)automated verification of smart contract fairness, whose results can be used to refute false claims with concrete examples or certify contract implementations with respect to desired fairness properties. We implement FairCon, which is able to check fairness properties including truthfulness, efficiency, optimality, and collusion-freeness for Ethereum smart contracts. We evaluate FairCon on a set of real-world benchmarks and the experiment result indicates that FairCon is effective in detecting property violations and able to prove fairness for common types of contracts.