On Off-Chaining Smart Contract Runtime Protection: A Queuing Model Approach

Abstract

The vulnerability of smart contracts has been demonstrated by an increasing number of multi-million exploitation incidents in public blockchains. Several works propose applying runtime verification to protect smart contracts post-deployment. However, none discuss the induced onchain overhead that may preclude its deployment, leaving smart contracts unprotected. A prominent solution to the onchain overhead is outsourcing the analysis off-chain. In this work, we analytically study the potential efficiency of off-chain smart contract runtime verification. We present a generic queueing network model of the off-chain runtime verification and the block generation process. The queuing model approach allows us to efficiently and flexibly capture the non-deterministic behavior of blockchain, estimating the number of transactions in the pool and their corresponding waiting times. We analyze the onchain overhead and evaluate off-chain RV, providing numerical indicators of transaction processing latency and throughput.