Ethereum is a distributed blockchain platform, serving as an ecosystem for smart contracts: full-fledged inter-communicating programs that capture the transaction logic of an account. Unlike programs in mainstream languages, the execution of an Ethereum smart contract is restricted by a gas limit: execution proceeds as long as gas is available. Thus, gas is a valuable resource that can be manipulated by an attacker to provoke unwanted behavior in a victim’s smart contract (e.g., wasting or blocking funds of said victim). Gas-focused vulnerabilities exploit undesired behavior when a contract (directly or through other interacting contracts) runs out of gas. Such vulnerabilities are among the hardest for programmers to protect against, as out-of-gas behavior may be uncommon in non-attack scenarios and reasoning about it is far from trivial. In this paper, we classify and identify gas-focused vulnerabilities, and present MadMax: a static program analysis technique to automatically detect gas-focused vulnerabilities with very high confidence. Our approach combines a control-flow-analysis-based decompiler and declarative program-structure queries. The combined analysis captures high-level domain-specific concepts (such as “dynamic data structure storage” and “safely resumable loops”) and achieves high precision and scalability. MadMax analyzes the entirety of smart contracts in the current Ethereum blockchain in just 10 hours (with decompilation timeouts in 8% of the cases) and flags contracts with a current (though highly volatile) monetary value of over $5B as vulnerable. Manual inspection of a sample of flagged contracts shows that 81% of the sampled warnings do indeed lead to vulnerabilities, which we report on in our experiment.
Slides (madmax.odp) | 1.48MiB |
Wed 7 NovDisplayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change
13:30 - 15:00 | |||
13:30 22mTalk | A Derivation Framework for Dependent Security Label Inference OOPSLA | ||
13:52 22mTalk | MadMax: Surviving Out-of-Gas Conditions in Ethereum Smart Contracts OOPSLA Neville Grech University of Athens, Michael Kong University of Sydney, Anton Jurisevic University of Sydney, Lexi Brent University of Sydney, Bernhard Scholz The University of Sydney, Yannis Smaragdakis University of Athens Link to publication Pre-print File Attached | ||
14:15 22mTalk | Faster Variational Execution with Transparent Bytecode Transformation OOPSLA Chu-Pan Wong Carnegie Mellon University, Jens Meinicke Magdeburg University, Lukas Lazarek , Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University | ||
14:37 22mTalk | Secure Serverless Computing Using Dynamic Information Flow Control OOPSLA Kalev Alpernas Tel Aviv University, Cormac Flanagan University of California, Santa Cruz, Sadjad Fouladi Stanford University, Leonid Ryzhyk VMware Research, Mooly Sagiv Tel Aviv University, Thomas Schmitz , Keith Winstein Stanford University |