Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

Skip to main content

Security Evaluation of Smart Contract-Based On-chain Ethereum Wallets

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Network and System Security (NSS 2020)

Abstract

Ethereum is a leading blockchain platform that supports decentralised applications (Dapps) using smart contract programs. It executes cryptocurrency transactions between user accounts or smart contract accounts. Wallets are utilised to integrate with Dapps to manage and hold users’ transactions and private keys securely and effectively. Ethereum wallets are available in different forms, and we especially examine on-chain smart contract wallets to measure their safeness property. We have conducted an exploratory study on 86 distinct bytecode versions of Ethereum smart contract wallets and analysed them using four popular security scanning tools. We have identified that, on average, 10.2% of on-chain wallets on the Ethereum platform are vulnerable to different problems. We propose a novel analysis framework to classify the security problems in smart contract wallets using the experimental data. Most of the vulnerabilities detected from smart contract wallets are related to security issues in programming code and interaction with external sources. Our experimental results and analysis data are available at https://github.com/ppraithe/on-chain-wallet-contracts.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/.

  2. 2.

    https://ethereumprice.org.

  3. 3.

    https://www.ethereum.org/.

  4. 4.

    https://etherscan.io/.

  5. 5.

    https://cointelegraph.com/news/parity-multisig-wallet-hacked-or-how-come.

  6. 6.

    https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/.

  7. 7.

    https://bit.ly/2SNQK3T.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/ppraithe/on-chain-wallet-contracts.

  9. 9.

    https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/.

  10. 10.

    https://bit.ly/33PQeZo.

References

  1. Antonopoulos, A.M., Wood, G.: Mastering Ethereum: Building Smart Contracts and DApps. O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Atzei, N., Bartoletti, M., Cimoli, T.: A survey of attacks on Ethereum smart contracts (SoK). In: Maffei, M., Ryan, M. (eds.) POST 2017. LNCS, vol. 10204, pp. 164–186. Springer, Heidelberg (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54455-6_8

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Chen, T., et al.: An adaptive gas cost mechanism for Ethereum to defend against under-priced DoS attacks. In: Liu, J.K., Samarati, P. (eds.) ISPEC 2017. LNCS, vol. 10701, pp. 3–24. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72359-4_1

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Chen, T., et al.: Tokenscope: automatically detecting inconsistent behaviors of cryptocurrency tokens in Ethereum. In: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 1503–1520 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Cheng, Z., et al.: Towards a first step to understand the cryptocurrency stealing attack on Ethereum. In: Proceedings of the 22nd international Symposium on research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2019), pp. 47–60 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Dannen, C.: Introducing Ethereum and Solidity. Apress, Berkeley (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-2535-6

    Book  Google Scholar 

  7. Delmolino, K., Arnett, M., Kosba, A., Miller, A., Shi, E.: Step by step towards creating a safe smart contract: lessons and insights from a cryptocurrency lab. In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P.Y.A., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds.) FC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9604, pp. 79–94. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Destefanis, G., Marchesi, M., Ortu, M., Tonelli, R., Bracciali, A., Hierons, R.: Smart contracts vulnerabilities: a call for blockchain software engineering? In: Proceedings of the 2018 International Workshop on Blockchain Oriented Software Engineering (IWBOSE), pp. 19–25 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Di Angelo, M., Salzer, G.: A survey of tools for analyzing Ethereum smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (DAPPCON), pp. 69–78. IEEE (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Di Angelo, M., Salzer, G.: Characteristics of wallet contracts on Ethereum. In: Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC 2020), pp. 1–2. IEEE (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Feist, J., Grieco, G., Groce, A.: Slither: a static analysis framework for smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain (WETSEB), pp. 8–15. IEEE (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Harz, D., Knottenbelt, W.: Towards safer smart contracts: A survey of languages and verification methods. arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.09805 (2018)

  13. Hildenbrandt, E., et al.: KEVM: a complete formal semantics of the Ethereum virtual machine. In: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE 31st Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), pp. 204–217. IEEE (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Luu, L., Chu, D.H., Olickel, H., Saxena, P., Hobor, A.: Making smart contracts smarter. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 254–269 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Mueller, B.: Smashing ethereum smart contracts for fun and real profit. HITB SECCONF Amsterdam (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Nikolić, I., Kolluri, A., Sergey, I., Saxena, P., Hobor, A.: Finding the greedy, prodigal, and suicidal contracts at scale. In: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pp. 653–663 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Palladino, S.: The parity wallet hack explained, July-2017. https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/on-the-parity-wallet-multisig-hack-405a8c12e8f7

  18. Parizi, R.M., Dehghantanha, A., et al.: Smart contract programming languages on blockchains: an empirical evaluation of usability and security. In: Chen, S., Wang, H., Zhang, L.J. (eds.) Blockchain, pp. 75–91. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94478-4_6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Perez, D., Livshits, B.: Broken metre: attacking resource metering in EVM. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.07220 (2019)

  20. Praitheeshan, P., Pan, L., Yu, J., Liu, J., Doss, R.: Security analysis methods on Ethereum smart contract vulnerabilities: a survey. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.08605 (2019)

  21. Praitheeshan, P., Xin, Y.W., Pan, L., Doss, R.: Attainable hacks on Keystore files in Ethereum wallets—a systematic analysis. In: Doss, R., Piramuthu, S., Zhou, W. (eds.) FNSS 2019. CCIS, vol. 1113, pp. 99–117. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34353-8_7

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  22. Tikhomirov, S., Voskresenskaya, E., Ivanitskiy, I., Takhaviev, R., Marchenko, E., Alexandrov, Y.: Smartcheck: static analysis of Ethereum smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain, pp. 9–16 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Torres, C.F., Schütte, J., State, R.: Osiris: hunting for integer bugs in Ethereum smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pp. 664–676 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Tsankov, P., Dan, A., Drachsler-Cohen, D., Gervais, A., Buenzli, F., Vechev, M.: Securify: practical security analysis of smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 67–82 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Wood, G.: Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum Project Yellow Paper 151, 1–32 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Purathani Praitheeshan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Appendices

Appendix A Interactions of Smart Contract Wallets

Fig. 3.
figure 3

Inter-playing components with Ethereum smart contract wallets

Appendix B Smart Contract Wallets Data

Table 7. On-chain wallets and source code versions

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Praitheeshan, P., Pan, L., Doss, R. (2020). Security Evaluation of Smart Contract-Based On-chain Ethereum Wallets. In: Kutyłowski, M., Zhang, J., Chen, C. (eds) Network and System Security. NSS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12570. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65745-1_2

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65745-1_2

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-65744-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-65745-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics