Selective Presumed Benevolence in Multi-party System Verification

Paper in proceeding, 2022

The functional correctness of particular components in a multi-party system may be dependent on the behaviour of other components and parties. Assumptions about how the other parties will act would thus have to be reflected in the specifications. In fact, one can find a substantial body of work on assume-guarantee reasoning with respect to the functional aspects of the component under scrutiny and those of other components. In this paper, we turn to look at non-functional assumptions about the behaviour of other parties. In particular, we look at smart contract verification under assumptions about presumed benevolence of particular parties and focusing on reentrancy issues—a class of bugs which, in the past few years, has led to huge financial losses. We make a case for allowing, in the specification, fine-grained assumptions on benevolence of certain parties, and show how these assumptions can be exploited in the verification process.