Model Checking of Hyperledger Fabric Smart Contracts

Abstract

Conducting interactions between shared-purpose organizations that are not entirely trustworthy of each other without centralized oversight is an idea that emerged with the advent of private blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric and its smart contracts. It is critical to check contracts to ensure their proper functionality, as organizations may collaborate with competitors. Due to the new architecture of Hyperledger Fabric, tools in this area are limited. To formally verify the source code of contracts, we mapped Fabric contract concepts into the Rebeca modeling language. Rebeca is an actor-based language that enables the modeling of concurrent and distributed systems and is supported by a model checking tool, Afra. We have identified vulnerabilities such as deadlock and starvation by examining the desired properties. Using the model checking approach, we could debug the code and hence benefit from speeding up the transactions, creating fewer extra blocks, requiring less storage space to store the ledger, and avoiding wasting computing resources.