Formal Systems Laboratory

A Formal Verification Tool for Ethereum VM Bytecode

Daejun Park and Yi Zhang and Manasvi Saxena and Philip Daian and Grigore Rosu
ESEC/FSE'18 ACM, pp 912-915, November 2018
PDF BIB ESEC/FSE'18 Formally Verified Smart Contracts

Abstract. In this paper, we present a formal verification tool for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode. To precisely reason about all possible behaviors of the EVM bytecode, we adopted KEVM, a complete formal semantics of the EVM, and instantiated the K-framework's reachability logic theorem prover to generate a correct-by-construction deductive verifier for the EVM. We further optimized the verifier by introducing EVM-specific abstractions and lemmas to improve its scalability. Our EVM verifier has been used to verify various high-profile smart contracts including the ERC20 token, Ethereum Casper, and DappHub MakerDAO contracts.