Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

12-2021

Abstract

Smart contracts are computerized transaction protocols built on top of blockchain networks. Users are charged with fees, a.k.a. gas in Ethereum, when they create, deploy or execute smart contracts. Since smart contracts may contain vulnerabilities which may result in huge financial loss, developers and smart contract compilers often insert codes for security checks. The trouble is that those codes consume gas every time they are executed. Many of the inserted codes are however redundant. In this work, we present sOptimize, a tool that optimizes smart contract gas consumption automatically without compromising functionality or security. sOptimize works on smart contract bytecode, statically identifies 3 kinds of code patterns, and further removes them through verification-assisted techniques. The resulting code is guaranteed to be equivalent to the original one and can be directly deployed on blockchain. We evaluate sOptimize on a collection of 1,152 real-world smart contracts and show that it optimizes 43% of them, and the reduction on gas consumption is about 2.0% while in deployment and 1.2% in transactions, the amount can be as high as 954,201 gas units per contract.

Keywords

smart contract, optimization, gas reduction

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 28th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2021), Virtual Conference, December 6-9

First Page

1

Last Page

11

City or Country

Virtual Conference

Download

Share

COinS