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: This paper analyzes 468 articles on the topic of smart contracts, providing a summary and analysis of the current state of research on smart contracts and identifying intellectual structures and emerging trends, and derives starting points for future research.
82 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: This survey aims to identify the key vulnerabilities in smart contracts on Ethereum in the perspectives of their internal mechanisms and software security vulnerabilities by correlating 16 Ethereum vulnerabilities and 19 software security issues.
Abstract: Smart contracts are software programs featuring both traditional applications and distributed data storage on blockchains. Ethereum is a prominent blockchain platform with the support of smart contracts. The smart contracts act as autonomous agents in critical decentralized applications and hold a significant amount of cryptocurrency to perform trusted transactions and agreements. Millions of dollars as part of the assets held by the smart contracts were stolen or frozen through the notorious attacks just between 2016 and 2018, such as the DAO attack, Parity Multi-Sig Wallet attack, and the integer underflow/overflow attacks. These attacks were caused by a combination of technical flaws in designing and implementing software codes. However, many more vulnerabilities of less severity are to be discovered because of the scripting natures of the Solidity language and the non-updateable feature of blockchains. Hence, we surveyed 16 security vulnerabilities in smart contract programs, and some vulnerabilities do not have a proper solution. This survey aims to identify the key vulnerabilities in smart contracts on Ethereum in the perspectives of their internal mechanisms and software security vulnerabilities. By correlating 16 Ethereum vulnerabilities and 19 software security issues, we predict that many attacks are yet to be exploited. And we have explored many software tools to detect the security vulnerabilities of smart contracts in terms of static analysis, dynamic analysis, and formal verification. This survey presents the security problems in smart contracts together with the available analysis tools and the detection methods. We also investigated the limitations of the tools or analysis methods with respect to the identified security vulnerabilities of the smart contracts.
82 citations
Cites background or methods from "A Survey of Attacks on Ethereum Sma..."
...• We compare the analysis methods with the vulnerability findings [60], [62], [76], [79], [83], [98], and coverage using their applications, such as vulnerability scanning tools [62], [64], [65], [66], [68], [71], [63] and verification models [91], [67], [92], [93], [81]....
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...attack was caused by a re-entrancy problem [62], [76] existing in the smart contract....
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...• We identify the security problems and vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts which have caused severe attacks [88], [89], [76], and significant loss of cryptocurrency [90]....
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...The actual state of the smart contract is unpredictable by any user when it was called by the user’s transaction [62], [76], [78]....
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...Different from the existing surveys [76], [77], [78], [79], [80], [83], [84], [85], [86], [87], this paper aims to specifically analyse the vulnerability detection methods for Ethereum smart contracts in the context of the identified security attacks...
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18 Apr 2018
TL;DR: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Blockchain security summarizing its current state, thoroughly showing threatening flaws and assessing some countermeasures to dissuade vulnerabilities on the network.
Abstract: The blockchain technology witnessed a wide adoption and a swift growth in recent years. This ingenious distributed peer-to-peer design attracted several businesses and solicited several communities beyond the financial market. There are also multiple use cases built around its ecosystem. However, this backbone introduced a lot of speculation and has been criticized by several researchers. Moreover, the lack of legislations perceived a lot of attention. In this paper, we are concerned in analyzing blockchain networks and their development, focusing on their security challenges. We took a holistic approach to cover the involved mechanisms and the limitations of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyperledger networks. We expose also numerous possible attacks and assess some countermeasures to dissuade vulnerabilities on the network. For occasion, we simulated the majority and the re-entrancy attacks. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Blockchain security summarizing its current state. Thoroughly showing threatening flaws, we are not concerned with favoring any particular blockchain network.
81 citations
Additional excerpts
...Transactions may become postponed or inaccurate [28]....
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TL;DR: A wide range of consensus algorithms leveraged in different public blockchain systems using a comprehensive taxonomy of properties are analysed and a decision tree of the reviewed algorithms is presented to be used as a tool to test the suitability of consensus algorithm for a particular application under different criteria.
77 citations
TL;DR: Tests demonstrated the system capability to act as a bridge between industrial assets and Blockchain platforms enabling the generation of immutable and trust-less “digital twins” for industrial IOT applications.
77 citations
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.
Abstract: The blockchain paradigm when coupled with cryptographically-secured transactions has demonstrated its
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2,755 citations
TL;DR: Protocols with application in important contracting areas, including credit, content rights management, payment systems, and contracts with bearer are discussed.
Abstract: Smart contracts combine protocols with user interfaces to formalize and secure relationships over computer networks. Objectives and principles for the design of these systems are derived from legal principles, economic theory, and theories of reliable and secure protocols. Similarities and differences between smart contracts and traditional business procedures based on written contracts, controls, and static forms are discussed. By using cryptographic and other security mechanisms, we can secure many algorithmically specifiable relationships from breach by principals, and from eavesdropping or malicious interference by third parties, up to considerations of time, user interface, and completeness of the algorithmic specification. This article discusses protocols with application in important contracting areas, including credit, content rights management, payment systems, and contracts with bearer.
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24 Oct 2016
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.
Abstract: Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90% of the total market capitalization of existing digital cryptocurrencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature. This opens the question whether existing security analysis of Bitcoin's PoW applies to other implementations which have been instantiated with different consensus and/or network parameters. In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.
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