Section: New Results

Blockchain

Ethereum Query Language Blockchains store a massive amount of heterogeneous data which will only grow in time. When searching for data on the Ethereum platform, one is required to either access the records (blocks) directly by using a unique identifier, or sequentially search several records to find the desired information. Therefore, we propose the Ethereum Query Language (EQL), a query language that allows users to retrieve information from the blockchain by writing SQL-like queries. The queries provide a rich syntax to specify data elements to search information scattered through several records. We claim that EQL makes it easier to search, acquire, format, and present information from the blockchain. [7]

SmartInspect: solidity smart contract inspector. Solidity is a language used for smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts are embedded procedures stored with the data they act upon. Debugging smart contracts is a really difficult task since once deployed, the code cannot be reexecuted and inspecting a simple attribute is not easily possible because data is encoded. We address the lack of inspectability of a deployed contract by analyzing contract state using decompilation techniques driven by the contract structure definition. Our solution, SmartInspect, also uses a mirror-based architecture to represent locally object responsible for the interpretation of the contract state. SmartInspect allows contract developers to better visualize and understand the contract stored state without needing to redeploy, nor develop any ad-hoc code. [8]

Preliminary Steps Towards Modeling Blockchain Oriented Software Even though blockchain is mostly popular for its cryptocurrency, smart contracts have become a very prominent blockchain application. Smart contracts are like classes that can be called by client applications outside the blockchain. Therefore it is possible to develop blockchain-oriented software (BOS) that implements part of the business logic in the blockchain by using smart contracts. Currently, there is no design standard to model BOS. Since modeling is an important part of designing a software, developers may struggle to plan their BOS. We show three complementary modeling approaches based on well-known software engineering models and apply them to a BOS example. Our goal is to start the discussion on specialized blockchain modeling notations. [13]

SmartAnvil: Open-Source Tool Suite for Smart Contract Analysis. Smart contracts are new computational units with special properties: they act as classes with aspectual concerns; their memory structure is more complex than mere objects; they are obscure in the sense that once deployed it is difficult to access their internal state; they reside in an append-only chain. There is a need to support the building of new generation tools to help developers. Such support should tackle several important aspects: (1) the static structure of the contract, (2) the object nature of published contracts, and (3) the overall data chain composed of blocks and transactions. In this chapter, we present SmartAnvil an open platform to build software analysis tools around smart contracts. We illustrate the general components and we focus on three important aspects: support for static analysis of Solidity smart contracts, deployed smart contract binary analysis through inspection, and blockchain navigation and querying. SmartAnvil is open-source and supports a bridge to the Moose data and software analysis platform. [21]