• Corpus ID: 208222424

EtherTrust: Sound Static Analysis of Ethereum bytecode

@inproceedings{Grishchenko2018EtherTrustSS,
  title={EtherTrust: Sound Static Analysis of Ethereum bytecode},
  author={Ilya Grishchenko and Matteo Maffei and Clara Schneidewind},
  year={2018}
}

• Ilya Grishchenko, Matteo Maffei, Clara Schneidewind
• Published 2018
• Computer Science

Ethereum has emerged as the most popular smart contract development platform, with hundreds of thousands of contracts stored on the blockchain and covering a variety of application scenarios, such as auctions, trading platforms, and so on. Given their financial nature, the security of these contracts is of paramount importance, as exemplified by recent attacks exploiting programming mistakes to freeze or steal millions of dollars (e.g., the DAO and Parity attacks). An automated security analysis of these contracts is thus of utmost interest, but it is challenging due to the EVM bytecode format in which contracts are uploaded on the blockchain, which exposes very little static information, and due to the specific transaction-oriented programming mechanisms, which feature a subtle semantics. In this work, we present the first sound and automated static analysis for EVM bytecode, which is practical and scales to large contracts. In particular, our static analysis supports reachability properties, which we show to be sufficient for capturing the most important security properties for smart contracts (e.g., single-entrancy and transaction environment dependency). The soundness of our analysis is proven against a complete and mechanized semantics of EVM bytecode. We implemented our analysis and tested our tool – EtherTrust – on real-world contracts from the Ethereum blockchain, comparing it with Oyente, the state-of-the-art bug finding tool for smart contracts: EtherTrust analyses real-life contracts in a few seconds, outperforming Oyente in efficiency and coverage by one order of magnitude. Furthermore, EtherTrust shows better precision on a benchmark, all of that despite being the first tool in the literature to provide formal security guarantees for EVM bytecode.