WEEKLY UPDATES on MATRIX SMARTCONTRACT PROJECT

11th June - 15th June, 2018

Semantic Computing

• Discuss and research on how to achieve auto extraction of contract semantics

• Propose a high-level design on auto extraction of contract semantics based on contract CFG (Control Flow Graph)

• Employ EVM bytecode parsing framework to generate CFG and automatically extract eigenvectors, as well as execute simple tests

• Finalized a Semantic Computing blueprint which is based on contract eigenvectors, including algorithm design, third-party libraries selection, the building of developing enviromnets, etc. Semantic Computing is currently in dev phase

Upgradable and Safe VM

• Discuss and research on how to address VM architecture and implementation details; go through go-ethereum VM code structures and dev interfaces;

• Finalize the high-level safe upgrade design for the VM end

• Based on the VM implementations of go-ethereum1.8.11, we completed the extensions to core module of interpreter, as well as JUMP_TABLE mapping

• Introduced a "Patched Contract" support to the VM, and added a —patchfile command line option;

• Prepared use cases for regression testing on new features;

• Completed a demo version of "Patched Contract" on VM side against BEC/SMT overflow vulnerbility.

18th June - 22th June, 2018

Semantic Computing

• Achieve the goal of automatic extraction of contract semantics characteristics as regards the EVM bytecode instructions; tests also done;

• Completed the training process to the GAlib-based semantic computing model, and performed the fitting training of simple data set for the model parameters;

• Completed framework codes for contract semantics clustering; finalized the use of third party libraries and the format of interactive data;

• Carrying out the analysis work on contract semantics template ; omnichannel preparations for demo use; as well as result analysis.

Upgradable and Safe VM

• Go on with the development of "Patched Contract", and go through code structures based on step-by-step debugging;

• Completed the development work of Transaction Function Recognition, and extended on the map data structure in statedb;

• Determined the implementation plan of patch permission authentication mechanism, focusing on the authentication scheme based on account address;

• Conducted research on contract upgrade, existing technology roadmap of patches, as well as coding design patterns;

• Built up a private chain for testing purpose, and completed the application of contract patches on the private chain

25th June - 29th June, 2018

Semantic Computing

• Completed the automatic framework of Semantic Computing, including characteristics extraction, model training and clustering;

• Complated the crawling and preparation of datasets;

• Optimized the training process to the GAlib-based semantic computing model, and completed the fitting training of contract code dataset for the model parameters;

• Completed the code similarity calculation algorithm based on Bipartie Matching algorithm;

• Completed the premilinary real contract data semantics clustering with not so ideal results; result analysis and extended experiments are in progress;

• Discussed together on the plan of framework optimization

Upgradable and Safe VM

• Research and discuss on contract upgrade plans and come out with a report; discuss on limitations and application scenarios of each upgrade plan;
• Go on with the development of "Patched Contract", refactor the code implementations under Core package; go through code structures based on step-by-step debugging;
• Implement refactoring and optimizations on VM codes deployed and upgraded on private chain;
• Read through go-ethereum API documetns and principles, as well as web3 related documents;
• Get down with technical proposal design on upgradable contract and VM

3rd July - 7th July, 2018

Semantic Computing

• Completed the semantics analysis on the current token based or walled based contract, and summarized several typical application scenarios;

• Completed design on automatically generated interaction scenarios by smart contracts;

• Completed the framework implementation of cluster based smartcontract semantics computing tools;

• Achieved the optimized extraction of semantic information, and completed the automatic training of weighting parameter based on GAlib;

Upgradable and Safe VM

• Discuss and research on the design scheme of Fault Tolerance system, analysing the practicability from the perspectives of technology and application of this proposal

• Go on with the development of "Patched Contract" supporting VM, and completed the optimized implementation of the PC address redirecting;

• Regarding the security vulnerability prediction engine related work, we focused on the taint analysis technology, and analyzed the feasibility of this technology at the virtual machine level;

• Completed the merge of open-source taint analysis and patching;

• Performed testing and debugging on security vulnerability prediction functions in private test-net.

9rd July - 13rd July, 2018

Semantic Computing

• Completed the design refination of the interactive scenarios generated automatically by smartcontracts, and finalized the prototype in form of web service, through different discussions;

• Frontend & background design and development in progress as regards smartcontract auto-generated prototype application scenarios

• Further research on existing contracts, and refine the feature classification and induction of application scenarios

• Completed the semantic extraction optimization plan of automatic contract semantics clustering tools, inlucding the optimization of original semantic vectors, computing models, etc;

• Completed the extention of dataset for evaluation and preparation of dataset; fine-tuned the parameters of automatic semantic clustering model;

• Evaluating the effects of clustering based on full datasets.

Upgradable and Safe VM