Visible to the public EasyFlow: keep ethereum away from overflow

TitleEasyFlow: keep ethereum away from overflow
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2019
AuthorsGao, Jianbo, Liu, Han, Liu, Chao, Li, Qingshan, Guan, Zhi, Chen, Zhong
Conference NameProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
Date Publishedmay
PublisherIEEE Press
Conference LocationMontreal, Quebec, Canada
Keywordscomposability, ethereum, Metrics, overflow vulnerability, pubcrawl, smart contract, taint analysis
AbstractWhile Ethereum smart contracts enabled a wide range of blockchain applications, they are extremely vulnerable to different forms of security attacks. Due to the fact that transactions to smart contracts commonly involve cryptocurrency transfer, any successful attacks can lead to money loss or even financial disorder. In this paper, we focus on the overflow attacks in Ethereum, mainly because they widely rooted in many smart contracts and comparatively easy to exploit. We have developed EasyFlow, an overflow detector at Ethereum Virtual Machine level. The key insight behind EasyFlow is a taint analysis based tracking technique to analyze the propagation of involved taints. Specifically, EasyFlow can not only divide smart contracts into safe contracts, manifested overflows, well-protected overflows and potential overflows, but also automatically generate transactions to trigger potential overflows. In our preliminary evaluation, EasyFlow managed to find potentially vulnerable Ethereum contracts with little runtime overhead. A demo video of EasyFlow is at https://youtu.be/QbUJkQI0L6o.
URLhttps://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-Companion.2019.00029
DOI10.1109/ICSE-Companion.2019.00029
Citation Keygao_easyflow_2019