Enhancing the Security of DeFi Ecosystem via Smart Contracts Analysis

Bitcoin! Ethereum! Cryptocurrency! Blockchain! In the past years, these words made headline news globally. The promise of blockchain, or decentralized ledger-based technologies, has electrified the world and created an excitement for technology that was last seen in the 1990s when the internet was entering mainstream. The core premise of the technology is that blockchains are secured by cryptography and economic incentives, and that they are governed by decentralized consensus. As such, it is critical that they are based on robust and sound economic and technological principles that enable good governance and safe societal welfare. Although today they work well in environments with a limited number of users, it remains unknown whether they work when applied at large scale. The rapid adoption of blockchains has also been closely followed by exploitation, including over a billion US dollars lost due to vulnerabilities in programming software modules that are executed on blockchains. This project plans to investigate the execution of those programs to test their functional correctness and specification against real-life events that trigger blockchain actions. It also plans to build safeguards around the execution of those programs in a blockchain environment.

Faculty Supervisor:

Andreas Veneris;Fan Long

Student:

Partner:

Bank of Canada

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Finance and Insurance; Manufacturing; Public administration

University:

University of Toronto

Program: