How CyLab researchers are safeguarding digital transactions

In 2013, a Pennsylvania man became the richest person on Earth… for about two minutes. PayPal had accidentally credited his account $92 quadrillion dollars. That’s a 92 with 15 zeros behind it. But within minutes, PayPal realized their mistake, and took it all back. Too bad.

Mistakes like this—big, small, and humongous—happen all too often, and typically they come down to bugs in “smart contracts”—computer programs that facilitate digital transactions online. In the case of the PayPal bug: 92 quadrillion is the maximum value that a 64-bit computer can store in its memory. A bug in the code initiated a transfer of funds representing that gigantic number.

As more and more of our finances and purchasing behaviors are moved online, the importance of bug-free smart contracts has never been greater. CyLab’s Ankush Das agonizes over this every day.

“If there is a way for a smart contract to accidentally pay you money—if that error exists—somebody will exploit it to pay themselves money. And this happens all the time, all over the place,” says Das, a computer science Ph.D. student advised by CyLab’s Jan Hoffman. “It’s very, very important that these smart contracts are free of errors.”

It's very, very important that these smart contracts are free of errors.

Ankush Das, Ph.D. student, School of Computer Science

Das is the lead designer and developer of a new programming language—which he has named ‘Nomos’—aimed at reducing such errors in smart contracts.

“All smart contracts—just like real contracts—have a pre-defined protocol,” he says. “Nomos has a way for a programmer to specify what that protocol is. Then, when you’re writing the actual program, the language will actually enforce that you satisfy your pre-defined protocol. If you make an error, it will say, ‘No no no, this is not correct. There’s a protocol mis-match.’”

Another feature of Nomos, Das says, relates to transaction fees the monetary cost of facilitating the transactions themselves. In most scenarios, people rarely pay transaction fees themselves, passing the buck to the credit card companies or the vendors. But on a blockchain—the decentralized network of computers around the world facilitating and recording cryptocurrency transactions—users pay the transaction fee themselves.

“A cool and unique feature of Nomos is that whenever you write a smart contract, the language will automatically tell you how much the transaction fee will be,” says Das. “There’s a guarantee—a mathematical theorem running in the background—that says: ‘If the language says the fee will be $5,’ then it will be exactly $5. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Das says that every transaction in the virtual world faces these potential challenges. Blockchains are just the most recent transparent application of smart contracts, exposing these issues to the world. Thus, the research ideas that power Nomos, like ensuring funds are not lost and ensuring protocols are enforced, can be applied in any digital financial realm.

“People who are skeptical of transacting on certain websites, or paying money in certain portals—the kind of work we are doing can help build people’s trust in these systems,” says Das.

For those interested, Nomos is available as a web interface and its code is open-source on GitHub.