An efficient approach to secure smart contract of Ethereum blockchain using hybrid security analysis approach

Abstract

The technology behind blockchain is quickly becoming one of the most crucial innovations in recent years. The Smart contracts are digital agreements, made in between two untrusted parties. Smart contracts are self-executable small piece of code that gets executed due to some predefined triggering conditions. Smart contracts store cryptocurrencies as their balances and deal in cryptocurrencies on network transactions. Because of this, smart contracts are constantly open to the possibility of being attacked. A single security vulnerability can make the smart contract very much insecure. The immutability property of the blockchain ensures that, once a smart contract has been placed on the blockchain, cannot be modified in any way. So, the smart contract must be analyzed for any kind of security vulnerability before its deployment on the blockchain. Existing analysis approaches detect vulnerabilities with high false positive rates. Our proposed approach analyses the smart contracts using a hybrid combination of pattern matching and symbolic execution, which produces results with a low false positive rate. We have performed a comparative analysis of our proposed approach to prove its efficiency with the existing research approaches on a data set of 453 smart contracts with tagged vulnerabilities.