VESC: Towards Temporal Verification of Smart Contracts

Abstract

Blockchain technologies are applied in diverse domains such as financial systems, supply chains, and identity management, leading to the emergence of various smart contract languages design. These contracts often involve time dependent transactions recorded immutably on the blockchain, making their correctness crucial. This paper addresses the formal verification of temporal behaviors in smart contracts without human interaction. We study 9 recent smart contract languages used in 7 leading blockchains and model 27 common temporal patterns from 3148 benchmarks across 9 domain specific application categories. We introduce VESC, a temporal specification language that allows developers to specify temporal properties in structured natural language, which VESC compiles into formal linear temporal logic. Our experiments demonstrate that VESC effectively specifies common temporal behaviors, paving the way for automated temporal verification of smart contracts.