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Register a new userDynamic Vulnerability Detection on Smart Contracts Using Machine Learning
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Added by
Mojtaba Eshghie
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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In this work we propose Dynamit, a monitoring framework to detect reentrancy vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts. The novelty of our framework is that it relies only on transaction metadata and balance data from the blockchain system; our approach requires no domain knowledge, code instrumentation, or special execution environment. Dynamit extracts features from transaction data and uses a machine learning model to classify transactions as benign or harmful. Therefore, not only can we find the contracts that are vulnerable to reentrancy attacks, but we also get an execution trace that reproduces the attack.
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With its unique advantages such as decentralization and immutability, blockchain technology has been widely used in various fields in recent years. The smart contract running on the blockchain is also playing an increasingly important role in decentralized application scenarios. Therefore, the automatic detection of security vulnerabilities in smart contracts has become an urgent problem in the application of blockchain technology. Hyperledger Fabric is a smart contract platform based on enterprise-level licensed distributed ledger technology. However, the research on the vulnerability detection technology of Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts is still in its infancy. In this paper, we propose HFContractFuzzer, a method based on Fuzzing technology to detect Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts, which combines a Fuzzing tool for golang named go-fuzz and smart contracts written by golang. We use HFContractFuzzer to detect vulnerabilities in five contracts from typical sources and discover that four of them have security vulnerabilities, proving the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Smart Contracts (SCs) in Ethereum can automate tasks and provide different functionalities to a user. Such automation is enabled by the `Turing-complete nature of the programming language (Solidity) in which SCs are written. This also opens up different vulnerabilities and bugs in SCs that malicious actors exploit to carry out malicious or illegal activities on the cryptocurrency platform. In this work, we study the correlation between malicious activities and the vulnerabilities present in SCs and find that some malicious activities are correlated with certain types of vulnerabilities. We then develop and study the feasibility of a scoring mechanism that corresponds to the severity of the vulnerabilities present in SCs to determine if it is a relevant feature to identify suspicious SCs. We analyze the utility of severity score towards detection of suspicious SCs using unsupervised machine learning (ML) algorithms across different temporal granularities and identify behavioral changes. In our experiments with on-chain SCs, we were able to find a total of 1094 benign SCs across different granularities which behave similar to malicious SCs, with the inclusion of the smart contract vulnerability scores in the feature set.
Vulnerability detection is an important issue in software security. Although various data-driven vulnerability detection methods have been proposed, the task remains challenging since the diversity and complexity of real-world vulnerable code in syntax and semantics make it difficult to extract vulnerable features with regular deep learning models, especially in analyzing a large program. Moreover, the fact that real-world vulnerable codes contain a lot of redundant information unrelated to vulnerabilities will further aggravate the above problem. To mitigate such challenges, we define a novel code representation named Slice Property Graph (SPG), and then propose VulSPG, a new vulnerability detection approach using the improved R-GCN model with triple attention mechanism to identify potential vulnerabilities in SPG. Our approach has at least two advantages over other methods. First, our proposed SPG can reflect the rich semantics and explicit structural information that may be relevance to vulnerabilities, while eliminating as much irrelevant information as possible to reduce the complexity of graph. Second, VulSPG incorporates triple attention mechanism in R-GCNs to achieve more effective learning of vulnerability patterns from SPG. We have extensively evaluated VulSPG on two large-scale datasets with programs from SARD and real-world projects. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of VulSPG.
The emerging blockchain technology supports decentralized computing paradigm shift and is a rapidly approaching phenomenon. While blockchain is thought primarily as the basis of Bitcoin, its application has grown far beyond cryptocurrencies due to the introduction of smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-enforcing pieces of software, which reside and run over a hosting blockchain. Using blockchain-based smart contracts for secure and transparent management to govern interactions (authentication, connection, and transaction) in Internet-enabled environments, mostly IoT, is a niche area of research and practice. However, writing trustworthy and safe smart contracts can be tremendously challenging because of the complicated semantics of underlying domain-specific languages and its testability. There have been high-profile incidents that indicate blockchain smart contracts could contain various code-security vulnerabilities, instigating financial harms. When it involves security of smart contracts, developers embracing the ability to write the contracts should be capable of testing their code, for diagnosing security vulnerabilities, before deploying them to the immutable environments on blockchains. However, there are only a handful of security testing tools for smart contracts. This implies that the existing research on automatic smart contracts security testing is not adequate and remains in a very stage of infancy. With a specific goal to more readily realize the application of blockchain smart contracts in security and privacy, we should first understand their vulnerabilities before widespread implementation. Accordingly, the goal of this paper is to carry out a far-reaching experimental assessment of current static smart contracts security testing tools, for the most widely used blockchain, the Ethereum and its domain-specific programming language, Solidity to provide the first...
Smart contracts are programs running on blockchain to execute transactions. When input constraints or security properties are violated at runtime, the transaction being executed by a smart contract needs to be reverted to avoid undesirable consequences. On Ethereum, the most popular blockchain that supports smart contracts, developers can choose among three transaction-reverting statements (i.e., require, if...revert, and if...throw) to handle anomalous transactions. While these transaction-reverting statements are vital for preventing smart contracts from exhibiting abnormal behaviors or suffering malicious attacks, there is limited understanding of how they are used in practice. In this work, we perform the first empirical study to characterize transaction-reverting statements in Ethereum smart contracts. We measured the prevalence of these statements in 3,866 verified smart contracts from popular dapps and built a taxonomy of their purposes via manually analyzing 557 transaction-reverting statements. We also compared template contracts and their corresponding custom contracts to understand how developers customize the use of transaction-reverting statements. Finally, we analyzed the security impact of transaction-reverting statements by removing them from smart contracts and comparing the mutated contracts against the original ones. Our study led to important findings, which can shed light on further research in the broad area of smart contract quality assurance and provide practical guidance to smart contract developers on the appropriate use of transaction-reverting statements.
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