verified-smart-contracts

showing what transformation is being applied to the state, why we want that transformation applied, what properties must hold throughout the transformation, and then demonstrating that those properties hold. Compare this (Compound): https://github.com/compound-finance/compound-protocol/blob/m... https://github.com/compound-finance/compound-protocol/tree/m... to this (Uniswap): https://github.com/runtimeverification/verified-smart-contra... https://github.com/runtimeverification/verified-smart-contra... or this (Djed): https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1069.pdf The first just describes the system and then asserts preconditions hold which works well enough for verifying that the code matches the spec but the other actually verify that the spec is doing what the user & developer expect it to by formalising the system and analysing the properties of that system. Compound's project wouldn't have been vulnerable to any of the attacks executed on CreamFi however they are vulnerable to the class of spec errors. Uniswap and Djed on the other hand would be protected from the majority of that class of issue that Compound experienced. This isn't to say that they are invulnerable but I'd be willing to say that they are approaching "cryptography-grade" security where you can trust these protocols just like you can trust AES, RSA, and ECC encryption & signing. --- This of course isn't to say that what Compound does is bad but as that incident shows, there is still room for their improvement in the security space. Cryptocurrency and "Decentralised Finance" are finally starting to grow up into proper subsets of the cryptocurrency and game theory communities. Now this might be a bit of general commentary on the SW space but hopefully long term this trend causes some of this security minded design to bleed over into the greater software engineering community.