Foundry Integration (Alpha)

Certora’s Foundry Integration allows formally verifying Foundry fuzz tests with the Certora Prover instead of writing specifications in CVL.

The Prover will yield higher guarantees of correctness than Foundry as all inputs will be evaluated. While fuzzing is not as complete as formal verification (a fuzzer might “miss” some inputs that would expose a bug), writing fuzz tests via Foundry is often easier since it uses Solidity.

Caution

This feature of the Certora Prover is in alpha state, so issues/unimplemented features are expected. Please contact us if you encounter any issue.

Usage

There is a minimum of 2 required files to get the Prover to verify Foundry fuzz tests: A .spec file (written in CVL), and a .conf file.

  • First, we need a .spec file written in CVL to tell the Prover what to verify. The file is very simple, and in the minimal case has exactly one line:

use builtin rule verifyFoundryFuzzTests;

  • Second, you need a .conf file that will provide the Prover the information of which contract to verify, and what .spec file to use. A minimal .conf file will look like this:

{
  "files": [
    "path/to/file/with/Foundry/fuzz/tests.sol:<name_of_contract_containing_the_tests>",
  ],
  "verify": "name_of_contract_containing_the_tests:path/to/spec/file.spec",
  "foundry_tests_mode": true,
}

  • Now, to run the tests, execute: certoraRun path/to/conf/file.conf

  • You will receive a link to a report containing the results of the run.

For a full running example, please also see our Foundry Integration Examples.

Key differences vs. Foundry fuzz testing

In Foundry, fuzz tests start with a blank state as the initial state (i.e. all storage fields are explicitly set to 0), and one can implement a setUp() function in order to bring the state to whatever initial state one wants to run the tests in. In contrast, the Prover starts with an arbitrary initial state and does not assume all storage fields to be initialized with 0 by default. This could cause the Prover to find spurious counter examples. For example, a fuzz test may assume that a storage value of balance is zero for all addresses and the Prover may choose some other initial state violating this basic assumption of the test.

To restrict the Prover’s search space to match the setup of the Foundry test, it’s possible write a special CVL function init_fuzz_tests that acts as a setup in CVL. This function may or may not be required depending on how the fuzz tests are setup.

override function init_fuzz_tests(method f, env e) {
  // your initial state assumptions here
}

Depending on your fuzz test, you may need to use the reset_storage command in the init_fuzz_tests function. This will explicitly set all storage fields of a contract to 0 before running the test. Alternatively, one could try to add a call to the setUp() function in the init_fuzz_tests function - please note that the init_fuzz_tests is an empty method by default.

Known Limitations

  • Foundry’s Invariant testing is not supported, i.e. forge tests prefixed with invariant are not formally verified. Under the hood, the built-in rule verifyFoundryFuzzTests is a parametric rule that picks up all methods that start in test* and will use these to formally verify them.

  • One of the usual usages of the setUp() function is to create new contract instances for testing. When setting up the Prover run, the way to handle such storage references to other contracts is to use linking. If, for example, we have the following test code

contract TestContract is Test {
  MyContract myContract;
	
  function setUp() external {
    myContract = new MyContract();
  }
  ...
}

then add to the .conf file:

  "files": [
    "...",
    "path/to/MyContract.sol"
  ],
  "link": [
    "...",
    "TestContract:myContract=MyContract"
  ]

This way when the Prover encounters myContract.foo() it knows what the implementation of foo is and is able to inline it.

  • Only a subset of the Foundry cheatcodes are currently implemented. The implemented cheatcodes include vm.assume, all assert* cheatcodes, vm.expectRevert, prank, startPrank, stopPrank, warp, and deal. Some other cheatcodes are irrelevant and are ignored, and many cheatcodes are not yet supported. One can recognize these by checking the Contracts Call Resolutions tab of the report - unimplemented cheatcodes will appear there as unresolved calls (which will usually lead to havocs and therefore spurious counter examples). In this case, please contact Certora so we can implement the required cheatcode.

  • In cases where no explicit revert is expected, and the goal is to verify values or state using assert* cheatcodes, you can use verifyFoundryFuzzTestsNoRevert. This ignores all code paths that lead to a revert while still verifying the assert* cheatcodes.

  • In Foundry, the vm.expectRevert cheatcode can optionally take a specific revert reason. Foundry verifies both that the test function reverted and that it reverted with the specified reason. In contrast, the Prover does not analyze the revert reason. As a result, if the test function reverts for a reason other than the expected one, the test will still be marked as successful.