Due ecosystem, it is common for new blockchains to fork or partially reuse the code of classic blockchains. For example, the popular Dogecoin, Litecoin, Binance BSC, and Polygon are all variants of Bitcoin/Ethereum. These “forked” blockchains thus could encounter similar vulnerabilities that are propagated from Bitcoin/Ethereum during forking or subsequently commit fetching. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of detecting and investigating the propagated vulnerabilities in forked blockchain projects. To facilitate this study, we propose BlockScope, a novel tool that can effectively and efficiently detect multiple types of cloned vulnerabilities given an input of existing Bitcoin/Ethereum security patches. Specifically, BlockScope adopts similarity-based code match and designs a new way of calculating code similarity to cover all the syntax-wide variant (i.e., Type-1, Type-2, and Type-3) clones. Moreover, BlockScope automatically extracts and leverages the contexts of patch code to narrow down the search scope and locate only potentially relevant code for comparison. Our evaluation shows that BlockScope achieves good precision and high recall both at 91.8% (1.8 times higher recall than that in the state-of-the-art ReDeBug while with close precision). BlockScope allows us to discover 101 previously unknown vulnerabilities in 13 out of the 16 forked projects of Bitcoin and Ethereum, including 16 from Dogecoin, 6 from Litecoin, 1 from Binance BSC, and 4 from Optimism. We have reported all the vulnerabilities to their developers; 40 of them have been patched or accepted, 66 were acknowledged or under pending, and only 4 were rejected. We further investigate the propagation and patching processes of discovered vulnerabilities, and reveal three types of vulnerability propagation from source to forked projects, as well as the long delay (mostly over 200 days) for releasing patches in Bitcoin forks (vs. ∼100 days for Ethereum forks).
Cyber physical system (CPS) is a network of cyber and physical elements, which interact with one another in a feedback form. CPS approves critical infrastructure and is treated as essential in day to day since it forms the basis of futuristic smart devices. An increased usage of CPSs poses security as a challenging issue and intrusion detection systems (IDS) can be applied for the identification of network intrusions. The latest advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) enables to design effective IDS models for the CPS environment. At the same time, metaheuristic algorithms can be employed as a feature selection approach in order to reduce the curse of dimensionality. With this motivation, this study develops a novel Poor and Rich Optimization with Deep Learning Model for Blockchain Enabled Intrusion Detection in CPS Environment, called PRO-DLBIDCPS technique. The proposed PRO-DLBIDCPS technique initially introduces an Adaptive Harmony Search Algorithm (AHSA) based feature selection technique for proper selection of feature subsets. For intrusion detection and classification, and attention based bi-directional gated recurrent neural network (ABi-GRNN) model is applied. In addition, the detection efficiency of the ABi-GRNN technique has been enhanced by the use of Poor and rich optimization (PRO) algorithm based hyperparameter optimizer, which resulted in enhanced intrusion detection results. Furthermore, blockchain technology is applied for enhancing security in the CPS environment. In order to demonstrate the enhanced outcomes of the PRO-DLBIDCPS technique, a wide range of simulations was carried out on benchmark dataset and the results reported the better outcomes of the PRO-DLBIDCPS technique in terms of several measures.
João Paulo de Brito Gonçalves, Gustavo Alochio, Rodolfo da Silva Villaça, Roberta Lima Gomes
The fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks are expected to provide various services compared to the 4G and previous generations of networks. The Quality of Service requirements can be quite different in terms of latency, bandwidth, reliability, and availability. 5G technology allows the fragmentation of the network into small pieces, known as network slices. This network slicing is done by specific tools and the configuration must be protected from attacks that may be performed by malicious users. Thus in this paper, a solution to protect and prevent these failures from happening is addressed. For this solution to be carried out, a study was conducted on the Blockchain technology, as well as the use of Oracles in order to implement an integrity verification system, a system capable of assuring 5G network slices' configuration integrity through a complete architecture involving Blockchain, Smart Contracts and Oracles.
Ningyu He, Haoyu Wang, Lei Wu, Xiapu Luo · 6 authors
EOSIO, as one of the most representative blockchain 3.0 platforms, involves lots of new features, e.g., delegated proof of stake consensus algorithm and updatable smart contracts, enabling a much higher transaction per second and the prosperous decentralized applications (DApps) ecosystem. According to the statistics, it has reached nearly 18 billion USD, taking the third place of the whole cryptocurrency market, following Bitcoin and Ethereum. Loopholes, however, are hiding in the shadows. EOSBet, a famous gambling DApp, was attacked twice within a month and lost more than 1 million USD. No existing work has surveyed the EOSIO from a security researcher perspective. To fill this gap, in this paper, we collected all occurred attack events against EOSIO, and systematically studied their root causes, i.e., vulnerabilities lurked in all relying components for EOSIO, as well as the corresponding attacks and mitigations. We also summarized some best practices for DApp developers, EOSIO official team, and security researchers for future directions.
WebAssembly (Wasm) smart contracts have shown growing popularity across blockchains (e.g., EOSIO) recently. Similar to Ethereum smart contracts, Wasm smart contracts suffer from various attacks exploiting their vulnerabilities. Even worse, few developers released the source code of their Wasm smart contracts for security review, raising the bar for uncovering vulnerable contracts. Although a few approaches have been proposed to detect vulnerable Wasm smart contracts, they have several major limitations, e.g., low code coverage, low accuracy and lack of scalability, unable to produce exploit payloads, etc. To fill the gap, in this paper, we design and develop WASAI, a new concolic fuzzer for uncovering vulnerabilities in Wasm smart contract after tackling several challenging issues. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate WASAI, and the results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. For example, it achieves 2x code coverage than the baselines and surpasses them in detection accuracy, with an F1-measure of 99.2%. Moreover, WASAI can handle complicated contracts (e.g., contracts with obfuscation and sophisticated verification). Applying WASAI to 991 deployed smart contracts in the wild, we find that over 70% of smart contracts are vulnerable. By the time of this study, over 300 vulnerable contracts have not been patched and are still operating on the EOSIO Mainnet. One fake EOS vulnerability reported to the EOSIO ecosystem was recently assigned a CVE identifier (CVE-2022-27134).
With the evolution of technology, blockchain a swiftly impending phenomenon i.e., "decentralized computing” is observed. The emergence of Smart Contracts (SC) has resulted in advancements in the application of blockchain technology. The Ethereum network’s computing capabilities and functionalities are founded on the basis of SC. A smart contract is a self-executing agreement between buyer and seller with the terms of the settlement between them, written directly as lines of code, existing across a distributed decentralized blockchain network. It is a decentralized software that runs on a blockchain autonomously, consistently, and publicly. Conversely, due to the complex semantics of fundamental domain-specific languages and their testability, constructing reliable and secure SC can be extremely difficult. SC might contain some vulnerabilities. Security vulnerabilities can originate from financial tribulations; there are a number of notorious events that specify blockchain SC could comprise numerous code-security vulnerabilities. Security and privacy of blockchain-based SC are very important, we must first identify their vulnerabilities before implementing them widely. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of two current security testing tools: Remix solidity static analysis plugin and Solium which are used for static analysis of SC. We have conducted an empirical analysis of SC for finding tangible and factual evidence, controlled by the scientific approach. The methodology’s first step is to gather all of the Ethereum SC and store them in a repository. The next step is to use the Remix solidity static analysis plugin and Solium to perform vulnerability assessments. The last step is to analyze the result of both tools and evaluate them on the basis of accuracy and effectiveness. The goal of this empirical analysis is to evaluate the two FOSS tools: Remix solidity static analysis plugin and Solium on the basis of accuracy and effectiveness. Some research questions were considered to reach the stated goal: What automated tools and frameworks are proposed in supporting the state-of-the-art empirical approach to SC vulnerability detection? How accurate are security analysis tools? And which tool has more accuracy rate? How effectively security analysis tools are detecting vulnerabilities in SC? And which is the most effective security analysis tool? We investigated the effectiveness and accuracy of security code analysis tools on Ethereum by testing them on a random sample of vulnerable contracts. The results indicate that the tools have significant discrepancies when it comes to certain security characteristics. In terms of effectiveness and accuracy, the Remix plugin outperformed and beat the other tool.
Abstract Data security and confidentiality are major goals now days due to the extensive use of the internet for data sharing. In modern era, most of the networks are compromised by intruders to grab access to private, confidential, and highly secured data. An intrusion detection system (IDS) is widely used to secure the network from getting compromised by intruders. Most of the IDS share the signatures of the novel attacks detected by anomaly approach for improving the detection rate and processing time. Security of signature shared by nodes is becoming a considerable problem. This paper presents a novel framework blockchain based hybrid intrusion detection system (BC-HyIDS), which uses the blockchain framework for exchanging signatures from one node to the other in distributed IDS. BC-HyIDS works in three phases where it uses both detection methods and blockchain in the third phase to provide security to data transferred through the network. This system makes use of a cryptosystem to encrypt the data stored in blocks to improve security one level higher. Hyperledger fabric v2.0 and Hyperledger sawtooth is used to implement system. Blockchain framework is created as a prototype using distributed ledger technology which helps in securing signature exchange. Performance of BC-HyIDS is evaluated in terms of accuracy, detection rate, and false alarm rate. From results, it is observed that a 2.8% increase in accuracy, 4.3% increase in detection rate, and a reduction of 2.6% in FAR is achieved. Blockchain performance is evaluated using Hyperledger fabric v2.0 and Hyperledger sawtooth on throughput, processing time, and average latency. BC-HyIDS shows improved performance when used with blockchain.
With countless devices connected to the Internet of Things, trust mechanisms are especially important. IoT devices are more deeply embedded in the privacy of people's lives, and their security issues cannot be ignored. Smart contracts backed by blockchain technology have the potential to solve these problems. Therefore, the security of smart contracts cannot be ignored. We propose a flexible and systematic hybrid model, which we call the Serial-Parallel Convolutional Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Network Model incorporating Ensemble Classifiers (SPCBIG-EC). The model showed excellent performance benefits in smart contract vulnerability detection. In addition, we propose a serial-parallel convolution (SPCNN) suitable for our hybrid model. It can extract features from the input sequence for multivariate combinations while retaining temporal structure and location information. The Ensemble Classifier is used in the classification phase of the model to enhance its robustness. In addition, we focused on six typical smart contract vulnerabilities and constructed two datasets, CESC and UCESC, for multi-task vulnerability detection in our experiments. Numerous experiments showed that SPCBIG-EC is better than most existing methods. It is worth mentioning that SPCBIG-EC can achieve F1-scores of 96.74%, 91.62%, and 95.00% for reentrancy, timestamp dependency, and infinite loop vulnerability detection.
In recent years, mobile edge computing (MEC) has become a research hotspot in academia. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an excellent way to build the infrastructure required for a MEC environment. Its rich digital tracking repository can provide insights into people's daily activities at home and elsewhere. Meanwhile, due to the open connectivity of the Internet of things devices, they can easily become the target of network attacks and be used by criminals as criminal tools. As a result, civil and criminal cases have increased year by year. This article conducts in-depth research on IoT forensics. By comparing its difference with traditional digital forensics (DF), the definition of IoT forensics is given. We have systematically sorted out the research results since the concept of IoT forensics was proposed in 2013 and proposed a generalized IoT forensics model. By studying blockchain technology and introducing it into the IoT forensics framework, a blockchain-based IoT forensics architecture is further proposed. Further, an alliance chain IoT forensics system is proposed. From the perspective of the data provider and the data visitor, the process of evidence storage and forensics of the IoT system is discussed. Finally, taking Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) forensics as an example, we give an experiment of IoT forensics analysis.
Hyperledger Fabric is another development of blockchain technology after Ethereum, which is more suitable as an operating platform for smart contracts. However, the testing technology of Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts (also known as chaincode) is not yet mature currently. Based on this, this paper studies the vulnerability detection of Golang chaincodes. Firstly, we summarize 17 kinds of Golang chaincode vulnerabilities by investigating existing research. Secondly, taking the high accuracy of dynamic detection and the high efficiency of static detection into consideration, we propose a chaincode vulnerability detection framework that combines the dynamic symbolic execution and the static abstract syntax tree analysis technology. We also implement a supporting-tool that can detect the above 15 types of vulnerabilities. Finally, we test the tool by 15 chaincodes collected from GitHub and unknown vulnerabilities were detected in 13 projects. The precision turned out to be 91% after manual inspection. In order to verify the recall rate, we manually inject 30 vulnerabilities into the collected chaincodes and all of them are detected. The evaluation results show the accuracy of the proposed vulnerability detection method for Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ben Weintraub, Christof Ferreira Torres, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Radu State
The rise of Ethereum has lead to a flourishing decentralized marketplace that has, unfortunately, fallen victim to frontrunning and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) activities, where savvy participants game transaction orderings within a block for profit. One popular solution to address such behavior is Flashbots, a private pool with infrastructure and design goals aimed at eliminating the negative externalities associated with MEV. While Flashbots has established laudable goals to address MEV behavior, no evidence has been provided to show that these goals are achieved in practice. In this paper, we measure the popularity of Flashbots and evaluate if it is meeting its chartered goals. We find that (1) Flashbots miners account for over 99.9% of the hashing power in the Ethereum network, (2) powerful miners are making more than $2\times$ what they were making prior to using Flashbots, while non-miners' slice of the pie has shrunk commensurately, (3) mining is just as centralized as it was prior to Flashbots with more than 90% of Flashbots blocks coming from just two miners, and (4) while more than 80% of MEV extraction in Ethereum is happening through Flashbots, 13.2% is coming from other private pools.
A smart contract that is deployed to a blockchain system like Ethereum is, under reasonable circumstances, expected to be immutable and tamper-proof. This is both a feature (promoting integrity and transparency) and a bug (preventing security patches and feature updates). Modern smart contracts use software tricks to enable upgradeability, raising the research questions of how upgradeability is achieved and who is authorized to make changes. In this paper, we summarize and evaluate six upgradeability patterns. We develop a measurement framework for finding how many upgradeable contracts are on Ethereum that use certain prominent upgrade patters. We find 1.4 million proxy contracts which 8,225 of them are unique upgradeable proxy contracts. We also measure how they implement access control over their upgradeability: about 50% are controlled by a single Externally Owned Address (EOA), and about 14% are controlled by multi-signature wallets in which a limited number of persons can change the whole logic of the contract.
Eugene B. Chang, Paul J. Darcy, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo, Nhien‐An Le‐Khac
Cryptocurrency has been (ab)used to purchase illicit goods and services such as drugs, weapons and child pornography (also referred to as child sexual abuse materials), and thus mobile devices (where cryptocurrency wallet applications are installed) are a potential source of evidence in a criminal investigation. Not surprisingly, there has been increased focus on the security of cryptocurrency wallets, although forensic extraction and attribution of forensic artefacts from such wallets is understudied. In this paper, we examine Bitcoin and Dogecoin. The latter is increasingly popular partly due to endorsements from celebrities and being positioned as an introductory path to cryptocurrency for newcomers. Specifically, we demonstrate how one can acquire forensic artefacts from Android Bitcoin and Dogecoin cryptocurrency wallets, such as wallet IDs, transaction IDs, timestamp information, email addresses, cookies, and OAuth tokens.
Smart contracts are self-executing programs that run on the blockchain and make it possible for peers to enforce agreements without a third-party guarantee. The smart contract on Ethereum is the fundamental element of decentralized finance with billions of US dollars in value. Smart contracts cannot be changed after deployment and hence the code needs to be verified for potential vulnerabilities. However, smart contracts are far from being secure and attacks exploiting vulnerabilities that have led to losses valued in the millions. In this work, we explore the current state of smart contracts security, prevalent vulnerabilities, and security-analysis tool support, through reviewing the latest advancement and research published in the past five years. We study 13 vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts and their countermeasures, and investigate nine security-analysis tools. Our findings indicate that a uniform set of smart contract vulnerability definitions does not exist in research work and bugs pertaining to the same mechanisms sometimes appear with different names. This inconsistency makes it difficult to identify, categorize, and analyze vulnerabilities. We explain some safeguarding approaches and best practices. However, as technology improves new vulnerabilities may emerge. Regarding tool support, SmartCheck, DefectChecker, contractWard, and sFuzz tools are better choices in terms of more coverage of vulnerabilities; however, tools such as NPChecker, MadMax, Osiris, and Sereum target some specific categories of vulnerabilities if required. While contractWard is relatively fast and more accurate, it can only detect pre-defined vulnerabilities. The NPChecker is slower, however, can find new vulnerability patterns.
The goal of the thesis is to study and perform an analysis of the possible attack vectors on the Iota network 2.0 version of the protocol. In this work, existing attack vectors on Distributed Ledger Technologies are studied and their applicability to the Iota 2.0 protocol is discussed. A specific attack that targets the capability of honest participants to write to the ledger is presented and analyzed in a network of nodes that run a full node software version.
Kunjian Song, Nedas Matulevicius, Eddie B. de Lima Filho, Lucas C. Cordeiro
Smart contracts written in Solidity are programs used in blockchain networks, such as Etherium, for performing transactions. However, as with any piece of software, they are prone to errors and may present vulnerabilities, which malicious attackers could then use. This paper proposes a solidity frontend for the efficient SMT-based context-bounded model checker (ESBMC), named ESBMC-Solidity, which provides a way of verifying such contracts with its framework. A benchmark suite with vulnerable smart contracts was also developed for evaluation and comparison with other verification tools. The experiments performed here showed that ESBMC-Solidity detected all vulnerabilities, was the fastest tool and provided a counterexample for each benchmark. A demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/3UH8_1QAVN0.
Mitchell Olsthoorn, Dimitri Stallenberg, Arie van Deursen, Annibale Panichella
Ethereum is the largest and most prominent smart contract platform. One key property of Ethereum is that once a contract is deployed, it can not be updated anymore. This increases the importance of thoroughly testing the behavior and constraints of the smart contract before deployment. Existing approaches in related work either do not scale or are only focused on finding crashing inputs. In this tool demo, we introduce SynTest-Solidity, an automated test case generation and fuzzing framework for Solidity. SynTest-Solidity implements various metaheuristic search algorithms, including random search (traditional fuzzing) and genetic algorithms (i.e., NSGA-II, MOSA, and DynaMOSA). Finally, we performed a preliminary empirical study to assess the effectiveness of SynTest-Solidity in testing Solidity smart contracts.
Shunhui Ji, Shaoqing Zhu, Pengcheng Zhang, Hai Dong · 5 authors
Smart contracts are commonly deployed for safety-critical applications, the quality assurance of which has been a vital factor. Test cases are standard means to ensure the correctness of data flows in smart contracts. To more efficiently generate test cases with high coverage, we propose an improved genetic algorithm-based test-case generation approach for smart contract data flow testing. Our approach introduces the theory of particle swarm optimization into the genetic algorithm, which reduces the influence brought by the randomness of genetic operations and enhances its capability to find global optima. A set of 30 real smart contracts deployed on Ethereum and GitHub is collected to perform the experimental study, on which our approach is compared with three baseline approaches. The experimental results show that, in most cases, the coverage of the test cases generated by our approach is significantly higher than the baseline approaches with relatively lower numbers of iterations and lower execution time.
Blockchain technologies have found important and concrete applications in the real world. Active solutions leverage Smart Contracts for the management of cryptocurrencies, sensitive data, and other valuable assets. One of the core objectives of blockchain-oriented software engineering (BOSE) is ensuring that Smart Contracts receive adequate pre-release testing to guarantee the deployment of reliable code. However, the novelty and the complexity of the blockchain environment pose new challenges to the validation and verification of Smart Contract based software. In this paper, we analyze the aforementioned challenges to foster the discussion on the specific topic of Smart Contract testing and identify relevant research directions.
Smart contracts are usually financial-related, which makes them attractive attack targets. Many static analysis tools have been developed to facilitate the contract audit process, but not all of them take account of two special features of smart contracts: (1) The external variables, like time, are constrained by real-world factors; (2) The internal variables persist between executions. Since these features import implicit constraints into contracts, they significantly affect the performance of static tools, such as causing errors in reachability analysis and resulting in false positives. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on implicit constraints from three aspects. First, we summarize the implicit constraints in smart contracts. Second, we evaluate the impact of such constraints on the state-of-the-art static tools. Third, we propose a lightweight but effective mitigation method named ConSym to deal with such constraints and integrate it into OSIRIS. The evaluation result shows that ConSym can filter out 96% of false positives and reduce false negatives by two-thirds.
Alex Groce, Kush Jain, Rijnard van Tonder, Goutamkumar Tulajappa Kalburgi · 5 authors
Bitcoin is one of the most prominent distributed software systems in the world. This paper describes an effort to investigate and enhance the effectiveness of the Bitcoin Core fuzzing effort. The effort initially began as a query about how to escape saturation in the fuzzing effort, but developed into a more general exploration. This paper summarizes the outcomes of a two-week focused effort. While the effort found no smoking guns indicating major test/fuzz weaknesses, it produced a large number of additional fuzz corpus entries, increased the set of fuzzers used for Bitcoin Core, and ran mutation analysis of Bitcoin Core fuzz targets, with a comparison to Bitcoin functional tests and other cryptocurrencies’ tests. Our conclusion is that for high quality fuzzing efforts, improvements to the oracle may be the best way to get more out of fuzzing.
Mitchell Olsthoorn, Dimitri Stallenberg, Arie van Deursen, Annibale Panichella
Ethereum is the largest and most prominent smart contract platform. One key property of Ethereum is that once a contract is deployed, it can not be updated anymore. This increases the importance of thoroughly testing the behavior and constraints of the smart contract before deployment. Existing approaches in related work either do not scale or are only focused on finding crashing inputs. In this tool demo, we introduce SynTest-Solidity, an automated test case generation and fuzzing framework for Solidity. SynTest-Solidity implements various metaheuristic search algorithms, including random search (traditional fuzzing) and genetic algorithms (i.e., NSGA-II, MOSA, and DynaMOSA). Finally, we performed a preliminary empirical study to assess the effectiveness of SynTest-Solidity in testing Solidity smart contracts.
In today's era, internet-connected things provide immense opportunities to the world for enhancing the quality of lives through better data processing and intelligent decision making. Since the last decade, IoT brought numerous changes in people's personal as well as professional lives. With the enhancement in quality of lives, IoT also comes up with challenges such as security and privacy of data and devices. Every day, the attacker generates new zero-day attacks for IoT devices and data, and it's important to detect and protect the IoT eco-system from this type of attacks. Numerous researchers have proposed security schemes and methods to protect the IoT eco-system through either cryptography way or learning technique based way. AI and ML learning techniques have got immense popularity in handling the IoT security challenges as they are automatic in nature and can outperform provided the sufficient quality and quantity of data. Moreover, the AI techniques, including ML, DL and FL helps in intelligent decision-making and can also generate knowledge through its learning techniques. AI needs data to process, and IoT supplies the necessary data to process. In this paper, we provide a state-of-the-art survey for IoT security solutions proposed based on learning techniques. We provide an in-depth review of available learning techniques to solve critical security challenges such as IoT authentication, access control, anomaly detection and malware analysis. At the end, we also highlighted various futuristic technologies that can invigorate IoT research and help in the design of full proof IoT eco-system.