ISOLA 2018 - Reliable Smart Contracts: State-of-the-art, Applications, Challenges and Future Directions

MOTIVATION

Blockchain is a global distributed ledger or database running on millions of devices where not just information but anything of value (money, music, art, intellectual property, votes, etc.) can be moved and stored securely and privately [1]. On the blockchain trust is established through mass (distributed) collaboration. Blockchain has the potential to change in a fundamental way how we deal not only with financial services but also with more general applications, improving transparency and regulation. Many applications have been proposed, starting with bitcoin [1], and smart contracts as introduced in Ethereum [2].

Smart contracts are software programs that self-execute complex instructions on blockchains. The promise of smart contract technology is to diminish the costs of contracting, enforcing contractual agreements, and making payments, while at the same time ensuring trust and compliance with the absence of a central authority. It is not clear, however, whether this promise can be delivered given the current state-of-the-art and state-of-practice of smart contracts.

In particular, the two most recent multi-million Ethereum bugs [4,5] just witness what the community were afraid of: that it is not clear what the contracts mean and how to ensure that they are reliable and bug-free. This calls for better programming languages with stronger security & privacy guarantees (or to provide mechanisms for verification, security and privacy to existing ones).

[1] Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)
[2] Ethereum (https://www.ethereum.org/)
[3] Solidity (http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/introduction-to-smart-contracts.html)
[4] Haseeb Qureshi. A hacker stole $31M of Ether  -  how it happened and what it means for Ethereum. Appeared at FreeCodeCamp, July 2017. (https://medium.freecodecamp.org/a-hacker-stole-31m-of-ether-how-it-happened-and-what-it-means-for-ethereum-9e5dc29e33ce)
[5] A. Hern. $300m in cryptocurrency’ accidentally lost forever due tobug. Appeared at The Guardian, November2017. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/cryptocurrency-300m-dollars-stolen-bug-ether)

AIM

In this track we want to encourage contributions for discussions related, but not limited, to:

• Research on different languages for expressing smart contracts (e.g., Solidity [3]).
• Research on the use of formal methods for specifying and verifying smart contracts (both statically and at runtime).
• Surveys and SoK about security and privacy issues related to smart contract technologies.
• New applications based on smart contracts.
• Description of challenges and research directions to future development for better smart contracts.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper submission March 31, 2018
• Notification of acceptance  May 31, 2018
• Camera-ready version  July 31, 2018
• Early registration  August 31, 2018
• Symposium ISoLA 2018  November 5-9, 2018

PUBLICATION

The ISoLA proceedings will appear in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

IMPRESSIONS

PROGRAM

There will be 4 sessions according to the ISoLA schedule, with three to four invited presentations of 20 minutes and 30 minutes for a general discussion. The sessions will be structured according to the different viewpoints or application fields from which the speakers the topic. You can find the schedule in detail below.

INVITED SPEAKERS (CONFIRMED)

• Massimo Bartoletti (University of Cagliari, IT) 
• Tiziana Cimoli (University of Cagliari, IT) 
• Christopher D. Clack (UCL, UK) 
• Joshua Ellul (University of Malta)
• Yoichi Hirai (Ethereum)
• Somesh Jha (UW Madison) 
• Christian Reitwiessner (Ethereum)
• Grigore Rosu (Urbana-Champaign) 
• Alejandro Russo (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)
• Ilya Sergey (UCL, UK) 
• Thomas Sibut-Pinote (UCL, UK)
• Petar Tsankov (ETH Zürich)
• Natasha Sharygina (Univ. of Lugano, Italy)
• Simon J. Thompson (Univ. of Kent, UK)

TRACK CHAIRS

• Martin Leucker, University of Lübeck, Germany
• César Sánchez, Instituto IMDEA Software, Madrid, Spain
• Gerardo Schneider, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

ACCEPTED PAPERS

• Blockchains as Kripke Models: an Analysis of Atomic Cross-Chain Swap
  Yoichi Hirai
• Contracts over Smart Contracts: Recovering from Violations Dynamically Track
  Gordon Pace, Christian Colombo, Joshua Ellul
• SMT-based Verification of Solidity Smart Contracts
  Leonardo Alt, Christian Reitwiessner
• Fun with Bitcoin smart contracts
  Massimo Bartoletti, Roberto Zunino, Tiziana Cimoli
• Temporal Properties of Smart Contracts
  Ilya Sergey, Amrit Kumar, Aquinas Hobor
• Verifying Michelson Smart Contract in F*: Extended Abstract
  Thomas Sibut-Pinote, Santiago Zanella-Béguelin
• Towards Adding Variety to Simplicity
  Nachiappan Valliappan, Solène Mirliaz, Elisabet Lobo Vesga, Alejandro Russo
• Smart Contracts and Opportunities for Formal Methods
  Andrew Miller, Zhicheng Cai, Somesh Jha
• Temporal Aspects of Smart Contracts for Financial Derivatives
  Christopher Clack, Gabriel Vanca
• Security Analysis of Smart Contracts in Datalog
  Petar Tsankov
• A Language-Independent Approach To Smart Contracts Verification
  Xiaohong Chen, Daejun Park, Grigore Rosu
• Computing Exact Worst-Case Gas Consumption for Smart Contracts
  Matteo Marescotti, Martin Blicha, Antti Hyvarinen, Sepideh Asadi, Natasha Sharygina
• Marlowe: financial contracts on blockchain
  Simon Thompson, Pablo Lamela Seijas

For more information, please e-mail one of the track chairs.