Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

5-2021

Abstract

Smart contracts are distributed, self-enforcing programs executing on top of blockchain networks. They have the potential to revolutionize many industries such as financial institutes and supply chains. However, smart contracts are subject to code-based vulnerabilities, which casts a shadow on its applications. As smart contracts are unpatchable (due to the immutability of blockchain), it is essential that smart contracts are guaranteed to be free of vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, smart contract languages such as Solidity are Turing-complete, which implies that verifying them statically is infeasible. Thus, alternative approaches must be developed to provide the guarantee. In this work, we develop an approach which automatically transforms smart contracts so that they are provably free of 4 common kinds of vulnerabilities. The key idea is to apply runtime verification in an efficient and provably correct manner. Experiment results with 5000 smart contracts show that our approach incurs minor run-time overhead in terms of time (i.e., 14.79%) and gas (i.e., 0.79%).

Keywords

Smart contracts, blockchain networks, vulnerabilities, runtime verification

Discipline

Programming Languages and Compilers | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

2021 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy: Virtual, May 23-27: Proceedings

First Page

1215

Last Page

1229

ISBN

9781728189345

Identifier

10.1109/SP40001.2021.00057

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

City or Country

Los Alamitos, CA

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/SP40001.2021.00057

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