Formal Aspects of Smart Contracts Security

Smart contracts are programs that automatically enforce some kind of agreement between parties, without the need of a trusted third party. Since they frequently deal with large sums of money (in the form of crypto assets) it is critical that smart contracts attain precisely to their specification and do not have any unexpected behaviour. During my thesis defense I will present two lines of research, one related to developing smart contract languages for the UTXO blockchain model, and the other related to the formalization of MEV attacks.