A detailed and real-time performance monitoring framework for blockchain systems

Zheng, Peilin; Zheng, Zibin; Wang, Liu; Chen, Xiangping; Liu, Xuanzhe

doi:10.1145/3183519.3183546

Cited by 139 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Zheng et al [49] propose a performance analysis of several blockchain systems which leverage smart contracts. Although the analysis goes beyond smart contracts metering, with metrics such as network related performance, it includes an analysis about smart contracts metering at the virtual machine level.…”

Section: Virtual Machines and Meteringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Broken Metre: Attacking Resource Metering in EVM

Pérez¹,

Livshits²

2020

Proceedings 2020 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

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Metering is an approach developed to assign cost to smart contract execution in blockchain systems such as Ethereum. This paper presents a detailed investigation of the metering approach based on gas taken by the Ethereum blockchain. We discover a number of discrepancies in the metering model such as significant inconsistencies in the pricing of the instructions. We further demonstrate that there is very little correlation between the gas and resources such as CPU and memory. We find that the main reason for this is that the gas price is dominated by the amount of storage that is used.Based on the observations above, we present a new type of DoS attack we call Resource Exhaustion Attack, which uses these imperfections to generate low-throughput contracts. Using this method, we show that we are able to generate contracts with a throughput on average 50 times slower than typical contracts. These contracts can be used to prevent nodes with lower hardware capacity from participating in the network, thereby artificially reducing the level of decentralization the network can deliver.

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Section: Virtual Machines and Meteringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Broken Metre: Attacking Resource Metering in EVM

Pérez¹,

Livshits²

2020

Proceedings 2020 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

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“…Consequently, users experience a faster chain experience resembling a web app or a payment card. We can use the following equation to calculate the time from when the transaction is first processed to when the block containing that transaction is confirmed in the blockchain network [67].…”

Section: Fig 5: Network Latency Comparison Between Ethereum and Eosmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In blockchain systems, the execution time depends on the program logic implemented by the smart contracts. We can use the following equation to determine how transactions are executed for a peer u in the blockchain network [67]. For the sake of simplicity, we abbreviate transaction as Tx, as shown below:…”

Section: Fig 6: Comparison Of Block Generation Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Context-Aware and Dynamic Role-Based Access Control Using Blockchain

Rahman

Guidi

Baiardi

et al. 2020

Advanced Information Networking and Applications

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Role-based access control (RBAC) policies represent the rights of subjects in terms of roles to access resources. This research proposes a scalable, flexible and auditable RBAC system using the EOS blockchain platform to meet the security requirements of organizations. The EOS blockchain platform for developing smart contract and decentralized applications (DAPPs) aims to address the scalability problem found in existing blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and Bitcoin. This smart contract platform aims to eliminate transaction fees while conducting millions of transactions per second. In our proposed approach, the EOS blockchain transparently stores RBAC policies. Administrative roles control access to resources at a higher level according to the way organizations perform business. An organization creates roles, role hierarchies and constraints to regulate users' actions. Therefore, once an RBAC framework is established, the administrative user (issuer) only needs to grant and revoke roles to support changes in the organizational structure. Moreover, resource owners delegate access rights to other subjects (in the same or different organization). Our proposed blockchain-based RBAC supports delegation capabilities using gaseless transactions which makes it adoptable and appealing in a large number of application scenarios. Our proposed solution is application-agnostic and well-suited for diverse use cases. Existing state-of-the art security frameworks are not suitable due to the difficulty of scale, higher cost and single point of failure. Consequently, organizations demand a scalable, cost-effective and lightweight access control solution which can better protect their privacy as well. A proof of concept implementation is developed based on the EOS blockchain. In particular, we deploy our proposed RBAC smart contract on the EOS Kylin testnet. Our experimental results and analysis clearly show that our EOS blockchain-based RBAC outperforms existing blockchain platforms in terms of cost, latency, block generation time, contract execution time and throughput.

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“…Some classical consistency algorithms like PBFT [10] (practical byzantine fault tolerance) are used as well. Furthermore, a few researchers make performance monitoring [37], [38] and try to improve existing mechanisms [11], [45]. Smart contract mechanisms attract experts of software engineering [13], [14] and security [15], [40], [50].…”

Section: A Blockchain Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The industrial reports on blockchain-based DApps focus on only basic usage statistics [2], [68], such as the number of daily active users and the amount of transactions. Academic research efforts are mainly devoted on the underlying blockchain system [37], [38], [42] as well as the mechanism of smart contracts [40], [50]. Few studies investigate the characteristics and development practices of blockchain-based DApps.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A first look at blockchain‐based decentralized applications

Huang

et al. 2019

Softw Pract Exp

Self Cite

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With the increasing popularity of blockchain technologies in recent years, blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApps for short in this paper) have been rapidly developed and widely adopted in many areas, being a hot topic in both academia and industry. Despite of the importance of DApps, we still have quite little understanding of DApps along with its ecosystem. To bridge the knowledge gap, this paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study of blockchain-based DApps to date, based on an extensive dataset of 995 Ethereum DApps and 29,846,075 transaction logs over them. We make a descriptive analysis of the popularity of DApps, summarize the patterns of how DApps use smart contracts to access the underlying blockchain, and explore the worth-addressing issues of deploying and operating DApps. Based on the findings, we propose some implications for DApp users to select proper DApps, for DApp developers to improve the efficiency of DApps, and for blockchain vendors to enhance the support of DApps.Index Terms-decentralized applications, Ethereum, smart contract, empirical study • RQ1: How is the popularity of DApps distributed?We explore the popularity of DApps by the number of unique users, transactions, and transaction volumes, and compare categories of DApps. We also examine the change of popularity as time evolves. By answering this question, we can provide an overview of the DApp market for all stakeholders in the DApp ecosystem. • RQ2: Are there any common practices of developing DApps? We investigate whether DApps are open source and how smart contracts are organized in a DApp. By answering this question, we can reveal the development arXiv:1909.00939v1 [cs.SE]

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A detailed and real-time performance monitoring framework for blockchain systems

Cited by 139 publications

References 15 publications

Broken Metre: Attacking Resource Metering in EVM

Broken Metre: Attacking Resource Metering in EVM

Context-Aware and Dynamic Role-Based Access Control Using Blockchain

A first look at blockchain‐based decentralized applications

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