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Secure Smart Contract Generation Based on Petri Nets

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Blockchain Technology for Industry 4.0

Part of the book series: Blockchain Technologies ((BT))

Abstract

Existing blockchain and smart contract development ecosystems do not support to design, develop, and verify secure smart contracts before deploying them. Recent attacks (see DAO hack [5]) on insecure smart contracts have caused a lot of financial loss—to avoid such issues in the future, we need better methods for creating secure smart contracts before deploying them in a blockchain. In this chapter, we present a method and a prototype tool to generate secure smart contracts based on Petri Nets. Our method allows to design and generate a secure smart contract template that can be deployed on a supported blockchain platform (e.g. Ethereum) with very little additional effort. One of the main advantages that our method brings into the smart contract development ecosystem is introducing a formal way to visually model, simulate, and verify business logic/workflows prior to the smart contract code generation. Modeling the smart contracts via Petri Nets helps the developers to minimize the logical errors—by verifying certain Petri Net properties such as deadlocks—during the modeling stage itself. Furthermore, our approach presents a technology-independent way to import and export the modeled use-case logic which can be translated into different smart contract language later.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/TGI/PetriNets/tools/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, Munich, Germany

    Nejc Zupan, Prabhakaran Kasinathan, Jorge Cuellar & Markus Sauer

  2. University of Passau, IT-Security Group, Passau, Germany

    Prabhakaran Kasinathan & Jorge Cuellar

Authors
  1. Nejc Zupan
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  2. Prabhakaran Kasinathan
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  3. Jorge Cuellar
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  4. Markus Sauer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nejc Zupan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Sao Leopoldo, Brazil

    Rodrigo da Rosa Righi

  2. ICT Lab, Information and Communications Technologies (Inatel), Santa Rita do Sapucai, Minas Gerais, Brazil

    Antonio Marcos Alberti

  3. Endicott College of International Studies, Woosong University, Daejeon, Korea (Republic of)

    Madhusudan Singh

7 Appendix

7 Appendix

1.1 7.1 Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) Example

The exported PNML code of the supply chain use case presented in Sect. 5.1 is shown in listing 1. Some parts of the XML code are omitted for readability (brevity) reasons.

figure a

1.2 7.2 Solidity Code

The generated Solidy smart contract of the supply chain use case presented in Sect. 5.1 is shown in listing 2.

figure b

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Zupan, N., Kasinathan, P., Cuellar, J., Sauer, M. (2020). Secure Smart Contract Generation Based on Petri Nets. In: Rosa Righi, R., Alberti, A., Singh, M. (eds) Blockchain Technology for Industry 4.0. Blockchain Technologies. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1137-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1137-0_4

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