Vulnerability Assessment on Ethereum Based Smart Contract Applications

Abstract

A Smart Contract is an agreement in the form of computer code that is made between two individuals. In a blockchain environment, smart contracts executed and stored in a shared ledger that are not modifiable. Ethereum is one of the major platforms used for smart contracts, where solidity basically is a high-level programming language used in the Ethereum to build smart contracts. Recent vulnerabilities found by the coders were not updated in analysis tool (SmartCheck) and therefore incapable of detecting vulnerabilities. No definitions of patterns were existing to detect these vulnerabilities. This paper focuses on the improvement of the Smartcheck analysis method to convert the source code of solidity into an intermediate representation based on XML and verifies this against the XPath patterns. Moreover, the latest vulnerabilities were listed to create new patterns to detect such vulnerabilities. The proposed method was evaluated with real world datasets and the results were compared with similar tools.