ÆGIS: Shielding Vulnerable Smart Contracts Against Attacks

in Proceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CCS ’20), October 5–9, 2020, Taipei, Taiwan (2020)

In recent years, smart contracts have suffered major exploits, cost- ing millions of dollars. Unlike traditional programs, smart contracts are deployed on a blockchain. As such, they cannot be modified ... [more ▼]

In recent years, smart contracts have suffered major exploits, cost- ing millions of dollars. Unlike traditional programs, smart contracts are deployed on a blockchain. As such, they cannot be modified once deployed. Though various tools have been proposed to detect vulnerable smart contracts, the majority fails to protect vulnera- ble contracts that have already been deployed on the blockchain. Only very few solutions have been proposed so far to tackle the issue of post-deployment. However, these solutions suffer from low precision and are not generic enough to prevent any type of attack. In this work, we introduce ÆGIS, a dynamic analysis tool that protects smart contracts from being exploited during runtime. Its capability of detecting new vulnerabilities can easily be extended through so-called attack patterns. These patterns are written in a domain-specific language that is tailored to the execution model of Ethereum smart contracts. The language enables the description of malicious control and data flows. In addition, we propose a novel mechanism to streamline and speed up the process of managing attack patterns. Patterns are voted upon and stored via a smart contract, thus leveraging the benefits of tamper-resistance and transparency provided by the blockchain. We compare ÆGIS to current state-of-the-art tools and demonstrate that our solution achieves higher precision in detecting attacks. Finally, we perform a large-scale analysis on the first 4.5 million blocks of the Ethereum blockchain, thereby confirming the occurrences of well reported and yet unreported attacks in the wild. [less ▲]

Whispering Botnet Command and Control Instructions

in 2nd Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology, Zug 24-26 June 2019 (2019, June 25)

A Transaction’s Journey: Transactional Enhancements for Public Blockchain-based Distributed Ledgers

Doctoral thesis (2019)

Interest in the decentralised nature of blockchain-based distributed ledgers has rapidly grown over the past few years. While a portion of this interest is fuelled by the price surge in Bitcoin towards ... [more ▼]

Interest in the decentralised nature of blockchain-based distributed ledgers has rapidly grown over the past few years. While a portion of this interest is fuelled by the price surge in Bitcoin towards the end of 2017, numerous companies across industries such as healthcare and finance have shown a keen interest in this technology and begun investing in diverse research projects. The work presented in this dissertation proposes a series of enhancements to blockchain-based distributed ledger technologies by focusing on a key element in the system: the transaction. By investigating the life cycle of a transaction in popular blockchain systems like bitcoin and ethereum, several enhancements were identified to tackle some of the challenges under active research today by the blockchain community. [less ▲]

Visual emulation for Ethereum's virtual machine

in NOMS 2018 - 2018 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (2018, July 09)

In this work we present E-EVM, a tool that emulates and visualises the execution of smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. By working with the readily available bytecode of smart contracts we ... [more ▼]

In this work we present E-EVM, a tool that emulates and visualises the execution of smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. By working with the readily available bytecode of smart contracts we are able to display the program's control flow graph, opcodes and stack for each step of contract execution. This tool is designed to aid the user's understanding of the Etheruem Virtual Machine as well as aid the analysis of any given smart contract. As such, it functions as both an analysis and a learning tool. It allows the user to view the code in each block of a smart contract and follow possible control flow branches. It is able to detect loops and suggest optimisation candidates. It is possible to step through a contract one opcode at a time. E-EVM achieved an average of 85.6% code coverage when tested. [less ▲]

Monitoring the transaction selection policy of Bitcoin mining pools

in NOMS 2018 - 2018 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (2018)

Mining pools are collection of workers that work together as a group in order to collaborate in the proof of work and reduce the variance of their rewards when mining. In order to achieve this, Mining ... [more ▼]

Mining pools are collection of workers that work together as a group in order to collaborate in the proof of work and reduce the variance of their rewards when mining. In order to achieve this, Mining pools distribute amongst the workers the task of finding a block so that each worker works on a different subset of the candidate solutions. In most mining pools the selection of transactions to be part of the next block is performed by the pool manager and thus becomes more centralized. A mining Pool is expected to give priority to the most lucrative transactions in order to increase the block reward however changes to the transaction policy done without notification of workers would be difficult to detect. In this paper we treat the transaction selection policy performed by miners as a classification problem; for each block we create a dataset, separate them by mining pool and apply feature selection techniques to extract a vector of importance for each feature. We then track variations in feature importance as new blocks arrive and show using a generated scenario how a change in policy by a mining pool could be detected. [less ▲]

Confirmation Delay Prediction of Transactions in the Bitcoin Network

in Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering (2017)

Bitcoin is currently the most popular digital currency. It operates on a decentralised peer-to-peer network using an open source cryptographic protocol. In this work, we create a model of the selection ... [more ▼]

Bitcoin is currently the most popular digital currency. It operates on a decentralised peer-to-peer network using an open source cryptographic protocol. In this work, we create a model of the selection process performed by mining pools on the set of unconfirmed transactions and then attempt to predict if an unconfirmed transaction will be part of the next block by treating it as a supervised classification problem. We identified a vector of features obtained through service monitoring of the Bitcoin transaction network and performed our experiments on a publicly available dataset of Bitcoin transaction. [less ▲]