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TECOmate:

Tools for the Enforcement of Smart Contracts On-line with MAthematics and TEchnology.

The word tecomate is pronunced [te.koˈma.te] in Spanish
and probably [te.koˈmeit] in English and is the name of tree that grows in Mexico and Central American countries. In Colombia it is called totumo.


We use TECOmate to name our Git repository that hosts the implementation of an hybrid achitecture for the enforcement of smart contracts. Hybrid means that it is composed of on-blockchain and off-blockchain components.

The main idea: split the clauses of the smart contract of interest into two sets and enforce them separately:

  • on--blockchain set: enforced by a smart contract running on-blockchain.
  • off-blockchain set: enforced by a smart contract running off-blocchain.

The main arguments in support of hybrid architectures are detailed in On and Off-Blockchain Enforcement Of Smart Contracts). In summary the argument is that:

  • the hybrid approach help in meeting some QoS requirements imposed on smart contracts that neither on of off blockchain approaches can meet individually.

  • application that involve several smart contracts running independent on and off blockchain components will become common practice in the near future.

Example of a smart contract

Let us use the following business contract agreed upon between a buyer and a seller of personal data and written in English language.

1) The buyer has the right to place a buy request with the 
   store to buy an item.
2) The store has the obligation to respond with either confirmation 
   or rejection within 3 days of receiving the request.
   a) No response from the store within 3 days will be treated as a rejection.
3) The buyer has the obligation to either pay or cancel the request 
   within 7 days of receiving a confirmation.
   a) No response from the buyer within 7 days will be treated as a 
   cancellation.
4) The buyer has the right to get a voucher from the store, withing 5 
   days of submitting payment.

To convert the contract written in natural language into a smart contract equivalent, it is convenient to represented it schematically firstly, as shown in the figure.

In the figure, the boxes represente the execution of contractual opetrations. For example, in the left most box, the buyer (the initiator) initiates the execution of the operation BuyReq against the store (the responder) a diamon models an exclusive OR split. O and R stand, respectively for Obligation and Right. TO stands for TimeOut. The dashed lines represent abnormal execution paths to the end of the contract that results from failures to meet obligations before the expiration of deadlines.

On and off blockchain enforcemement

Let us assume henceforth that the buyer and the store have agreed to use a hybrid architecture where the operation pay will be enforced on blockchain and all other operations, off blockchain. An abstract view of the corresponding hybrid architecture is shown in the figure:

As shown in the figure, the split of the contractual clauses result in two contract components (on-blockchain smart contract and off-blockchain smart contract) that interact with each other to enforce the original contract written in English.

Motivation and potential applications

There is a large range of potential applications of an hybrid architecture like this. Its salient feature is the off-blockchain enforcing capability that the off-blockchain smart contract (hosted by our Contract Compliance Checker) can provide.

For example, the off-blockchain smart contract can be used for offering several off-blockchain services to on-blockchain smart contracts: computation, data storage, data provision, event notification, trust and monitoring/enforcement of polices and regulations.

Basically, the off-blockchain smart contract can act as a contract-aware bridge between the on-blockchain and off-blockchain worlds (see figure above). It can feed data and events to on-blockchain smart contracts only when some conditions hold. Complementary, it can receive data and events (for example, the occurrence of the pay operation) from on-blockchain smart contracts and react (perform some operations) or ignore them only when some conditions hold.

It is worth remarking that the bridging functionality performed by the off-blockchain smart contract is similar to that of the Town Crier discussed in the Town Crier: An Authenticated Data Feed for Smart Contracts, CCS'16, Fan Zhang et. al. However, in addition to bridging the on-blockchain and off-blockchain worlds, the off-blockchain smart contract performs enforcing functions.

To mention a specific application example, the hybrid architecture can be used to address the conflict between the indelible append-only data model that underpins blockchains and the right to request deletion of personal data granted by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of May 2018. In this scenario, the Contract Compliance Checker can be loaded with a smart contract that stipulates the conditions that personal data need to satisfy before becoming accessible to on-blockchain smart contracts and stored in indelible blocks.

Hybrid architecture, technologies tools and mathematics

The hybrid architecture that we have implemented for the enforcement of smart contracts like the example discussed above is shown in the figure.

The architecture is a combination of several practical technologies and tools underpinned by Mathematical formalisms which in the current implementation are aimed at preventing the deployment of unsound smart contracts.

An in-depth discussion of the components and their integration is presented in Implementation of Smart Contracts Using Hybrid Architectures with On- and Off-Blockchain Components). An 8 page version of the report has been published at SC2.

In this section, we will present only a summary.

  • CCC(Contract Compliance Checker): is a tool implemented for contract enforcement. It is a Java application composed of several files, RESTful interfaces, and a database. At its core lies a FSM that grants and removes rights, obligations and prohibitions to the contracting parties as the execution of the contract progresses. To enforce a smart contract with the CCC, the developer (i) writes the contract in the Drools language and stores it in a .drl file (for example dataseller.drl), (ii) loads (copies) the drl file into the configuration/drools/upload folder, and (iii) deploys and instantiates the CCC as a web server (for example on a TTP node) that waits for the arrival of events representing the contractual operation. An event is a notification about the execution of a contractual operation by a contractual partner. For example when the buyer of the contract example executes the operation BuyReq the event BuyReq is generated by the buyer’s application and sent to the CCC for evaluation.

  • dataseller.drl: is the off blockchain component of the smart contract. It is written in the drools language and deployed on the CCC. We call it also the Centralised Smart Contract (SCc).

  • ethereum client in the rinkeby ethereum network: is an ethereum node deployed on the rinkeby ethereum network-- a experimental network that developers use to test their applications using tokens instead ot actual cryptocurrecies.

  • collectPayment.sol: is the on blockchain component of the smart contract. It is written in the Solidity language and deployed on the ethereum client running in the rinkeby ethereum network. on the CCC. We call it also the Decentralised Smarc Contract (SCd).

  • web3j: is library that offfers communication facilities that allow Java applications like the CCC to communicate with Ethereum clients.

  • client: is an ordinary computer instrumented to send to the CCC the contractual events (for example, BuyReq, pay, rej, etc.) that correspond to the execution of the contractual operations estipulated in the contract.

  • epromela: is a tool for building models of smart contracts that can be validated by the Spin model checker against correctness properties expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulae. We use the promela tool for

    • veriying the logical correctness of the contract at design time and
    • conformance testing, namely, for generating execution sequences (test cases) to test the actual implementation.

    The code of the epromela tool is stored in the contraval repository along with instructions to use it and examples, including a Hello World contract example and the smart contract example discussed above.

    As suggested by the thick desconnected arrow, we use epromela to model check the contract and produce execution sequences off line, that is, before deploying and executing the dataseller.drl and collectPayment.sol contracts.

    To generate all the execution sequences mechanically and store them in a local disk (see subfolders with N exec sequences), the contraval repository includes two scripts that we have implemented:

    • Python script
    • linux shell scrypt

    The two scripts are responsible for storing in a local folder (see figure) all the execution sequences encoded in the smart contract.

Installation

This section provides only a summary of the installation. The installation procedure will be detailed in TECOmateUserGuide_ver12Aug2018.pdf file which is currently under preparation.

In the following directions, we use % to represent the linux prompt.

1. Install ethereum v1.8.13-stable and create a new account

  1. follow instructions to install geth, bear in mind that the initialization of the blockchain takes about eight hours:

  2. follow instructions to create a new account in rinkeby testnet using:

    • % geth —rinkeby account new

    • type the password (passphrase) of the account created to accountPassword field of the ccc-ethereum.properties file located as tecomate/CCCRest-ear-commons/src/main/resources/ccc-ethereum.properties

  3. display the list of current accounts in rinkeby testnet to verify that the account has been created and to see disk location of the keystore file. You will need this information complete the population of the parameters of the ccc-ethereum.properties file:

    • % geth —rinkeby account list
      • copy the address of the account created to the contractAddress field of the ccc-ethereum.properties file, the address looks like 0x9a6944f1b5f3368c53966415dc6ef66f3a7338d3
      • copy the keystore path to the keyStoreFilePath field of the ccc-ethereum.properties file. It looks like /Users/carlosmolina/Library/Ethereum/rinkeby/keystore ...

2. Install metamask

  1. install metamask add-on metamask.io to your browser.

  2. create a metamask account.

  3. choose rinkeby testnet.

  4. import to metamask the account created previously using geth:

    • use % geth —rinkeby acount list to find where the keystore file is stored. From the import menu, select json file option as opposed to Private key. In the Enter password type the Passprase (for example test) used when you created (eg with geth) the account that you are importing.

  5. buy ether tokens from rinkeby faucet www.rinkeby.io.

3. Compile contract written in solidity and create wraper code to deploy it

  1. install solc compiler: (solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.4.24/installing-solidity.html):

    • % npm install -g solc

  2. install web3j command-line tool v3.5.0:

  3. go to solidity-contracts folder.

  4. compile the collectPayment.sol contract using the solc compiler:

    • % solc collectPayment.sol --bin --abi --optimize -o .

  5. execute web3j command-line tool to create java wrappers for the collectPayment.sol solidity contract:

    • % web3j solidity generate collectPayment.bin collectPayment.abi -p uk.ac.ncl.ethereum.contract -o .

  6. copy the generated contract folder to tecomate/CCCRest-ear-commons/src/main/java/uk/ac/ncl/ethereum

4. Deploy the collectPayment.sol contract in the Rinkeby testnet

  1. go to remix ide to compile and deploy the collectPayment.sol smart contract.

  2. if the compilation is successful go to Run tab.

  3. in the "Environment" box (right side to the screen) choose "Injected web3". This option will use metamask to deploy the smart contract.

  4. make sure the correct account is selected in the “Account” box.

  5. click the "Deploy" button.

  6. click "submit" in metamask to deploy the collectPayment.sol smart contract to rinkeby testnet.

  7. add the contract address to the contractAddress field of the ccc-ethereum.properties file.

5. Execute the two smart contracts: in CCC and rinkeby ethereum testnet

  1. start jboss EAP server in your local computer:

    • % ./run.sh

  2. deploy an instance of the CCC with the included java wrapper for the collectPayment.sol smart contract:

    • % mvn clean package jboss-as:deploy

  3. start geth using rinkeby testnet and enabling json-rpc api:

    • % geth --rinkeby --syncmode "fast" --cache=1024 --rpc console

  4. go to the CCCRestClient folder and start the client. It will retrieve the execution sequences from the local folders (dataseller.pmlExec1, dataseller.pmlExecSeq2, etc.) and send them to the CCC:

    • % ./runClient.sh

Contributors

  • Massimo Strano developed the underlying Java components that integrate drools with the Contract Compliance Checker as part of his PhD dissertation (2010) at University of Newcastle, UK.
  • Ionnis Sfyrakis from University of Newcastle, UK (Ioannis.Sfyrakis@newcastle.ac.uk) implemented the Web server interfaces to the Contract Compliance Checker as part of his Masters degree (2012) at Newcastle and since them he has been actively contributing to the hybrid architecture.
  • Carlos Molina-Jimenez from The Department of Computer Science and Technology (Computer Laboratory), University of Cambridge (Carlos.Molina@cl.cam.ac.uk) has been the main architect of the architecture. He has been maintaining, documenting and testing the tool. He is currently (2018) working in the TESCON project (EPSRC grant Grant: RG90413 NRAG/536).

Bug reporting and comments

Feel free to email carlos.molina + @ + cl.cam.a.uk if you have comments, bugs to report or questions.

Licence

The contraval tool is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 which is available from Apache’s web pages.