A Survey of Attacks on Ethereum Smart Contracts SoK
22 Apr 2017-Vol. 10204, pp 164-186
TL;DR: This work analyses the security vulnerabilities of Ethereum smart contracts, providing a taxonomy of common programming pitfalls which may lead to vulnerabilities, and shows a series of attacks which exploit these vulnerabilities, allowing an adversary to steal money or cause other damage.
Abstract: Smart contracts are computer programs that can be correctly executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the need of an external trusted authority. Since smart contracts handle and transfer assets of considerable value, besides their correct execution it is also crucial that their implementation is secure against attacks which aim at stealing or tampering the assets. We study this problem in Ethereum, the most well-known and used framework for smart contracts so far. We analyse the security vulnerabilities of Ethereum smart contracts, providing a taxonomy of common programming pitfalls which may lead to vulnerabilities. We show a series of attacks which exploit these vulnerabilities, allowing an adversary to steal money or cause other damage.
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TL;DR: A comprehensive classification of blockchain-enabled applications across diverse sectors such as supply chain, business, healthcare, IoT, privacy, and data management is presented, and key themes, trends and emerging areas for research are established.
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...In particular, blockchain-based systems supporting SCs enable more complex processes and interactions so they establish a new paradigm with practically limitless applications....
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...SCs defined in 1994 by Szabo as: “a computerised transaction protocol that executes the terms of a contract” (Szabo, 1994), allow us to translate contractual clauses into embeddable code (Szabo, 1997) thus minimizing external participation and risks....
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...In these contexts, the information monitored by the devices could be stored in the form of SCs or transactions into the blockchain....
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...In particular, blockchain technology and the use of SCs could solve problems of scientific credibility of findings (missing data, endpoint switching, data dredging, and selective publication) in clinical trials (Nugent et al., 2016) as well as issues of patients’ informed consent (Benchoufi and Ravaud, 2017; Benchoufi et al., 2017)....
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...Therefore, blockchain applications that implement SCs to verify multiple types of operations, such as individual properties, are used to state the contractual relationships between the Internet actors, being them companies or individuals (Chen and Zhu, 2017; Ishmaev, 2017; Governatori et al., 2018; Herian, 2017)....
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15 Oct 2018
TL;DR: Securify as mentioned in this paper is a security analyzer for Ethereum smart contracts that is scalable, fully automated, and able to prove contract behaviors as safe/unsafe with respect to a given property.
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Cites background from "A Survey of Attacks on Ethereum Sma..."
...the miners that control more than half of the PoW resources can control the inclusion of new blocks and also possibly rewrite the BC history (Atzei et al., 2017)....
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References
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TL;DR: Ethereum as mentioned in this paper is a transactional singleton machine with shared state, which can be seen as a simple application on a decentralised, but singleton, compute resource, and it provides a plurality of resources, each with a distinct state and operating code but able to interact through a message-passing framework with others.
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TL;DR: This paper introduces a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains and devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints.
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1,258 citations
24 Oct 2016
TL;DR: This paper investigates the security of running smart contracts based on Ethereum in an open distributed network like those of cryptocurrencies, and proposes ways to enhance the operational semantics of Ethereum to make contracts less vulnerable.
Abstract: Cryptocurrencies record transactions in a decentralized data structure called a blockchain. Two of the most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, support the feature to encode rules or scripts for processing transactions. This feature has evolved to give practical shape to the ideas of smart contracts, or full-fledged programs that are run on blockchains. Recently, Ethereum's smart contract system has seen steady adoption, supporting tens of thousands of contracts, holding millions dollars worth of virtual coins. In this paper, we investigate the security of running smart contracts based on Ethereum in an open distributed network like those of cryptocurrencies. We introduce several new security problems in which an adversary can manipulate smart contract execution to gain profit. These bugs suggest subtle gaps in the understanding of the distributed semantics of the underlying platform. As a refinement, we propose ways to enhance the operational semantics of Ethereum to make contracts less vulnerable. For developers writing contracts for the existing Ethereum system, we build a symbolic execution tool called Oyente to find potential security bugs. Among 19, 336 existing Ethereum contracts, Oyente flags 8, 833 of them as vulnerable, including the TheDAO bug which led to a 60 million US dollar loss in June 2016. We also discuss the severity of other attacks for several case studies which have source code available and confirm the attacks (which target only our accounts) in the main Ethereum network.
1,232 citations