Yuqi (Stephanie) Ma

We introduce a version of probabilistic Kleene algebra with angelic nondeterminism and a corresponding class of automata. Our approach implements semantics via distributions over multisets in order to overcome theoretical barriers arising from the lack of a distributive law between the powerset and Giry monads. We produce a full Kleene theorem and a coalgebraic theory, as well as both operational and denotational semantics and equational reasoning principles.

Smart contracts are frequently vulnerable to control-flow attacks based on confused deputies, reentrancy, and incorrect error handling. These attacks exploit the complexity of interactions among multiple possibly unknown contracts. Existing best practices to prevent vulnerabilities rely on code patterns and heuristics that produce both false positives and false negatives. Even with extensive audits and heuristic tools, new vulnerabilities continue to arise, routinely costing tens of millions of dollars. We introduce SCIF, a language for secure smart contracts, that addresses these classes of control-flow attacks. By extending secure information flow mechanisms in a principled way, SCIF enforces both classic end-to-end information flow security and new security restrictions on control flow, even when SCIF contracts interact with malicious non-SCIF code. SCIF is implemented as a compiler to Solidity. We show how SCIF can secure contracts with minimal overhead through case studies of applications with intricate security reasoning and a large corpus of insecure code.

Modern software security increasingly relies on bug bounty programs, which incentivize independent researchers to discover and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities. While effective in traditional software ecosystems, these programs face unique challenges in the context of smart contracts. Smart contracts run on blockchains, manage financial assets, and are typically authored by pseudonymous developers. As a result, when vulnerabilities are discovered, security researchers often lack a secure and reliable channel for disclosure. Existing workarounds, such as encrypting messages to contract authors' public keys, introduce inefficiencies and privacy risks, since ciphertexts themselves may reveal the presence of bugs. We propose DeadDrop, the first system to support oblivious bug reporting for smart contracts. DeadDrop combines oblivious message retrieval (OMR) with a trusted execution environment (TEE) to enable researchers to privately and efficiently deliver vulnerability reports without revealing their intended recipient or overwhelming authors with spam. Our design specifies security requirements for such a system, presents practical techniques for handling long messages, and introduces a bug specification language to formalize submissions. We implement a prototype and evaluate its performance, demonstrating that oblivious bug reporting is both feasible and efficient, achieving an amortized processing time of approximately 3 ms per submission. Finally, we discuss incentive mechanisms to encourage participation, highlighting open challenges for decentralized bug bounty ecosystems.

We introduce a version of probabilistic Kleene algebra with angelic nondeterminism and a corresponding class of automata. Our approach implements semantics via distributions over multisets in order to overcome theoretical barriers arising from the lack of a distributive law between the powerset and Giry monads. We produce a full Kleene theorem and a coalgebraic theory, as well as both operational and denotational semantics and equational reasoning principles.