Towards Secure and Trusted-by-Design Smart Contracts
This addresses the need for secure and trusted smart contracts in blockchain applications, particularly for evidential transactions, but appears incremental as it identifies a gap without proposing a new solution.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring security and trust in smart contracts used for evidential protocols on blockchains, noting that current languages lack guarantees for trust and accountability, which is critical as these contracts operate without trusted third-parties. It highlights this as a significant issue without providing specific numerical results or methods.
Distributed immutable ledgers, or blockchains, allow the secure digitization of evidential transactions without relying on a trusted third-party. Evidential transactions involve the exchange of any form of physical evidence, such as money, birth certificate, visas, tickets, etc. Most of the time, evidential transactions occur in the context of complex procedures, called evidential protocols, among physical agents. The blockchain provides the mechanisms to transfer evidence, while smart contracts - programs executing within the blockchain in a decentralized and replicated fashion - allow encoding evidential protocols on top of a blockchain. As a smart contract foregoes trusted third-parties and runs on several machines anonymously, it constitutes a highly critical program that has to be secure and trusted-by-design. While most of the current smart contract languages focus on easy programmability, they do not directly address the need of guaranteeing trust and accountability, which becomes a significant issue when evidential protocols are encoded as smart contracts.