Abstract
Java is a high-level, well-known and powerful object-oriented language, with a large support library and a comfortable toolbelt. Hence, it has been proposed for writing smart contracts in blockchain. However, its support library is non-deterministic, which is a blocking issue for its application to smart contracts. This paper discusses the kind of (non-)determinism of the methods of the Java library and how a deterministic fragment of that library can be specified. It shows that some relevant parts are deterministic only under specific conditions on run-time values. It concludes with the description of an instrumentation, for the Takamaka blockchain, that enforces such conditions, statically or dynamically, reporting experiments with its implementation.
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Notes
- 1.
Java also allows so-called special calls, such as
, that start the look-up from a given static type; as well as calls embedded in closures, such as method references (corresponding to
in Java bytecode). For simplicity, these calls are not discussed here, but our implementation deals with them. - 2.
These signatures are copy and paste from the library source code. For the use of generics, wildcards and
in these signatures, we refer to
[13]. - 3.
The Java bytecode of the smart contract will contain an instruction
, or a similar one for a subtype of
.
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Spoto, F. (2020). Enforcing Determinism of Java Smart Contracts. In: Bernhard, M., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12063. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54455-3_40
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