Software engineering

Programming language

Formal specification

Virtual machine

Formal methods

Formal verification

Executable

Bytecode

Computer science

Correctness

Semantics (computer science)

A developing field of interest for the distributed systems and applied cryptography communities is that of smart contracts: self-executing financial instruments that synchronize their state, often through a blockchain. One such smart contract system that has seen widespread practical adoption is Ethereum, which has grown to a market capacity of 100 billion USD and clears an excess of 500,000 daily transactions. Unfortunately, the rise of these technologies has been marred by a series of costly bugs and exploits. Increasingly, the Ethereum community has turned to formal methods and rigorous program analysis tools. This trend holds great promise due to the relative simplicity of smart contracts and bounded-time deterministic execution inherent to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Here we present KEVM, an executable formal specification of the EVM's bytecode stack-based language built with the K Framework, designed to serve as a solid foundation for further formal analyses. We empirically evaluate the correctness and performance of KEVM using the official Ethereum test suite. To demonstrate the usability, several extensions of the semantics are presented. and two different-language implementations of the ERC20 Standard Token are verified against the ERC20 specification. These results are encouraging for the executable semantics approach to language prototyping and specification.

KEVM: A Complete Formal Semantics of the Ethereum Virtual Machine