ABSTRACT
Smart contracts are new computational units with special properties: they act as classes with aspectual concerns; their memory structure is more complex than mere objects; they are obscure in the sense that, once they are deployed, it is difficult to access their internal state; they reside in an append-only chain. There is a need to support the building of new generation tools to help developers. Such support should tackle several important aspects: (1) the static structure of the contract, (2) the object nature of published contracts, and (3) the overall data chain composed of blocks and transactions. In this chapter, we present SmartAnvil, an open platform to build software analysis tools around smart contracts. We illustrate the general components, and we focus on three important aspects: support for static analysis of Solidity smart contracts, deployed smart contract binary analysis through inspection, and blockchain navigation and querying. SmartAnvil is open source and supports a bridge to the Moose data and software analysis platform.
