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Register a new usereThor: Practical and Provably Sound Static Analysis of Ethereum Smart Contracts
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Added by
Clara Schneidewind
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Ethereum has emerged as the most popular smart contract development platform, with hundreds of thousands of contracts stored on the blockchain and covering a variety of application scenarios, such as auctions, trading platforms, and so on. Given their financial nature, security vulnerabilities may lead to catastrophic consequences and, even worse, they can be hardly fixed as data stored on the blockchain, including the smart contract code itself, are immutable. An automated security analysis of these contracts is thus of utmost interest, but at the same time technically challenging for a variety of reasons, such as the specific transaction-oriented programming mechanisms, which feature a subtle semantics, and the fact that the blockchain data which the contract under analysis interacts with, including the code of callers and callees, are not statically known. In this work, we present eThor, the first sound and automated static analyzer for EVM bytecode, which is based on an abstraction of the EVM bytecode semantics based on Horn clauses. In particular, our static analysis supports reachability properties, which we show to be sufficient for capturing interesting security properties for smart contracts (e.g., single-entrancy) as well as contract-specific functional properties. Our analysis is proven sound against a complete semantics of EVM bytecode and an experimental large-scale evaluation on real-world contracts demonstrates that eThor is practical and outperforms the state-of-the-art static analyzers: specifically, eThor is the only one to provide soundness guarantees, terminates on 95% of a representative set of real-world contracts, and achieves an F-measure (which combines sensitivity and specificity) of 89%.
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Gas is a measurement unit of the computational effort that it will take to execute every single operation that takes part in the Ethereum blockchain platform. Each instruction executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has an associated gas consumption specified by Ethereum. If a transaction exceeds the amount of gas allotted by the user (known as gas limit), an out-of-gas exception is raised. There is a wide family of contract vulnerabilities due to out-of-gas behaviours. We report on the design and implementation of GASTAP, a Gas-Aware Smart contracT Analysis Platform, which takes as input a smart contract (either in EVM, disassembled EVM, or in Solidity source code) and automatically infers sound gas upper bounds for all its public functions. Our bounds ensure that if the gas limit paid by the user is higher than our inferred gas bounds, the contract is free of out-of-gas vulnerabilities.
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Ethereum smart contracts are distributed programs running on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Since program flaws can cause significant monetary losses and can hardly be fixed due to the immutable nature of the blockchain, there is a strong need of automated analysis tools which provide formal security guarantees. Designing such analyzers, however, proved to be challenging and error-prone. We review the existing approaches to automated, sound, static analysis of Ethereum smart contracts and highlight prevalent issues in the state of the art. Finally, we overview eThor, a recent static analysis tool that we developed following a principled design and implementation approach based on rigorous semantic foundations to overcome the problems of past works.
This paper presents SigVM, a novel blockchain virtual machine that supports an event-driven execution model, enabling developers to build fully autonomous smart contracts. SigVM introduces another way for a contract to interact with another. Contracts in SigVM can emit signal events, on which other contracts can listen. Once an event is triggered, corresponding handler functions are automatically executed as signal transactions. We built an end-to-end blockchain platform SigChain and a contract language compiler SigSolid to realize the potential of SigVM. Experimental results show that SigVM enables contracts in our benchmark applications to be reimplemented in a fully autonomous way, eliminating the dependency on unreliable mechanisms like off-chain relay servers. SigVM can significantly simplify the execution flow of our benchmark applications, and can avoid security risks such as front-run attacks.
The growing adoption of smart contracts on blockchains poses new security risks that can lead to significant monetary loss, while existing approaches either provide no (or partial) security guarantees for smart contracts or require huge proof effort. To address this challenge, we present SciviK, a versatile framework for specifying and verifying industrial-grade smart contracts. SciviKs versatile approach extends previous efforts with three key contributions: (i) an expressive annotation system enabling built-in directives for vulnerability pattern checking, neural-based loop invariant inference, and the verification of rich properties of real-world smart contracts (ii) a fine-grained model for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that provides low-level execution semantics, (iii) an IR-level verification framework integrating both SMT solvers and the Coq proof assistant. We use SciviK to specify and verify security properties for 12 benchmark contracts and a real-world Decentralized Finance (DeFi) smart contract. Among all 158 specified security properties (in six types), 151 properties can be automatically verified within 2 seconds, five properties can be automatically verified after moderate modifications, and two properties are manually proved with around 200 lines of Coq code.
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