Biblio

Filters: Author is Gervais, Arthur  [Clear All Filters]
2019-06-28
Tsankov, Petar, Dan, Andrei, Drachsler-Cohen, Dana, Gervais, Arthur, Bünzli, Florian, Vechev, Martin.  2018.  Securify: Practical Security Analysis of Smart Contracts. Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :67-82.

Permissionless blockchains allow the execution of arbitrary programs (called smart contracts), enabling mutually untrusted entities to interact without relying on trusted third parties. Despite their potential, repeated security concerns have shaken the trust in handling billions of USD by smart contracts. To address this problem, we present Securify, a security analyzer for Ethereum smart contracts that is scalable, fully automated, and able to prove contract behaviors as safe/unsafe with respect to a given property. Securify's analysis consists of two steps. First, it symbolically analyzes the contract's dependency graph to extract precise semantic information from the code. Then, it checks compliance and violation patterns that capture sufficient conditions for proving if a property holds or not. To enable extensibility, all patterns are specified in a designated domain-specific language. Securify is publicly released, it has analyzed 18K contracts submitted by its users, and is regularly used to conduct security audits by experts. We present an extensive evaluation of Securify over real-world Ethereum smart contracts and demonstrate that it can effectively prove the correctness of smart contracts and discover critical violations.

2017-11-03
Gervais, Arthur, Karame, Ghassan O., Wüst, Karl, Glykantzis, Vasileios, Ritzdorf, Hubert, Capkun, Srdjan.  2016.  On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. :3–16.
Proof of Work (PoW) powered blockchains currently account for more than 90% of the total market capitalization of existing digital cryptocurrencies. Although the security provisions of Bitcoin have been thoroughly analysed, the security guarantees of variant (forked) PoW blockchains (which were instantiated with different parameters) have not received much attention in the literature. This opens the question whether existing security analysis of Bitcoin's PoW applies to other implementations which have been instantiated with different consensus and/or network parameters. In this paper, we introduce a novel quantitative framework to analyse the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. Based on our framework, we devise optimal adversarial strategies for double-spending and selfish mining while taking into account real world constraints such as network propagation, different block sizes, block generation intervals, information propagation mechanism, and the impact of eclipse attacks. Our framework therefore allows us to capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions.