Modeling Bitcoin contracts by timed automata
From MaRDI portal
Abstract: Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cryptographic currency system. Since its introduction in 2008, Bitcoin has gained noticeable popularity, mostly due to its following properties: (1) the transaction fees are very low, and (2) it is not controlled by any central authority, which in particular means that nobody can "print" the money to generate inflation. Moreover, the transaction syntax allows to create the so-called contracts, where a number of mutually-distrusting parties engage in a protocol to jointly perform some financial task, and the fairness of this process is guaranteed by the properties of Bitcoin. Although the Bitcoin contracts have several potential applications in the digital economy, so far they have not been widely used in real life. This is partly due to the fact that they are cumbersome to create and analyze, and hence risky to use. In this paper we propose to remedy this problem by using the methods originally developed for the computer-aided analysis for hardware and software systems, in particular those based on the timed automata. More concretely, we propose a framework for modeling the Bitcoin contracts using the timed automata in the UPPAAL model checker. Our method is general and can be used to model several contracts. As a proof-of-concept we use this framework to model some of the Bitcoin contracts from our recent previous work. We then automatically verify their security in UPPAAL, finding (and correcting) some subtle errors that were difficult to spot by the manual analysis. We hope that our work can draw the attention of the researchers working on formal modeling to the problem of the Bitcoin contract verification, and spark off more research on this topic.
Recommendations
Cited in
(30)- Incentive-driven attacker for corrupting two-party protocols
- Game theoretic notions of fairness in multi-party coin toss
- How to build time-lock encryption
- Bitcoin private key locked transactions
- TARDIS: a foundation of time-lock puzzles in UC
- Abuse resistant law enforcement access systems
- FAST: fair auctions via secret transactions
- Blind polynomial evaluation and data trading
- Coin-based multi-party fair exchange
- P2DEX: privacy-preserving decentralized cryptocurrency exchange
- Shielded computations in smart contracts overcoming forks
- A formal model of Algorand smart contracts
- Formal verification of fair exchange based on Bitcoin smart contracts
- Cryptographic algorithms for privacy-preserving online applications
- Absentia: secure multiparty computation on ethereum
- Bankrupting Sybil despite churn
- Designing proof of human-work puzzles for cryptocurrency and beyond
- Modeling and analysis of block arrival times in the Bitcoin blockchain
- Verifying liquidity of recursive bitcoin contracts
- \(\log^\ast\)-round game-theoretically-fair leader election
- Fully-secure MPC with minimal trust
- Game-Theoretic Analysis of an Incentivized Verifiable Computation System
- Financially backed covert security
- (Public) verifiability for composable protocols without adaptivity or zero-knowledge
- Accountable storage
- Expected linear round synchronization: the missing link for linear Byzantine SMR
- Bicorn: an optimistically efficient distributed randomness beacon
- McFly: verifiable encryption to the future made practical
- Eagle: efficient privacy preserving smart contracts
- Cryptocash, cryptocurrencies, and cryptocontracts
This page was built for publication: Modeling Bitcoin contracts by timed automata
Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q5500550)
