WANA: Symbolic Execution of Wasm Bytecode for Extensible Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Jiang, Bo; Chen, Yifei; Wang, Dong; Ashraf, Imran; Chan, Wing Man

doi:10.1109/qrs54544.2021.00102

Cited by 19 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Vulnerable code line (8) figure 11: 4.14 SWE-116: Block values as a proxy for time Access to time values is frequently required for contracts to carry out specific sorts of functionality. However, using the value of block.timestamp, or block.number is not a safe operation as those values could be manipulated by the nodes that execute the smart contract [7], [11]- [15], [17], [19]- [21], [23]. To fix this code, a developer should either use an Oracle system to check for the exact time or allow an error range.…”

Section: Swe-104: Unchecked Call Return Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, it is difficult to build a reliable adequate source of randomness for apps in the Blockchain. In the Ethereum Blockchain for example smart contract using the blockhash block timestamp or any node-controlled global variable as a source of randomness is insecure as they can be controlled and known by the other smart contract in the same block [7], [11], [13]- [15], [17], [20], [21], [23]. Vulnerable code [24] lines (5,10,11,12) Figure 15: To get a good source of randomization and to keep the Blockchain result deterministic, developers should use Oracles.…”

Section: Swe-118: Incorrect Constructor Namementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The forged transfer Notification vulnerability happens when the smart contract fails to check if the destination (data.to) of the EOS transfer is itself within its transfer function. This may result in wrong consideration by the vulnerable smart contract as a successful EOS receive from the sender rather than just a notification [23]. Vulnerable code line (4) Figure 27: As shown in this example, if contract C fails to check whether the destination (i.e., data.to) of EOS transfer is itself within its transfer function, it may wrongly consider that it has received EOS from the sender rather than just a notification.…”

Section: Swe-149: Forged Transfer Notificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Unveiling the Landscape of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: A Detailed Examination and Codification of Vulnerabilities in Prominent Blockchains

Zaazaa,

Bakkali

2023

IJCNC

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With the rise in using immature smart contract programming languages to build a decentralized application, more vulnerabilities have been introduced to the Blockchain and were the main reasons behind critical financial losses. Moreover, the immutability of Blockchain technology makes deployed smart contracts unfixable for the whole life of the Blockchain itself. The lack of complete and up-to-date resources that explain those vulnerabilities in detail has also contributed to increasing the number of vulnerabilities in Blockchain. In addition, the lack of a standardized nomination of the existing vulnerabilities has made redundant research and made developers more confused. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the most complete list of smart contract vulnerabilities that exist in the most popular Blockchains with a detailed explanation of each one of them. In addition, we propose a new codification system that facilitates the communication of those vulnerabilities Moreover, the discussed list of vulnerabilities covers multiple Blockchain and could be used for even future built Blockchains.

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Section: Swe-104: Unchecked Call Return Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Swe-118: Incorrect Constructor Namementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Swe-149: Forged Transfer Notificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Unveiling the Landscape of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: A Detailed Examination and Codification of Vulnerabilities in Prominent Blockchains

Zaazaa,

Bakkali

2023

IJCNC

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“…(2) Applications with bi-directional security requirements, i.e., the application does not trust the computing device and vice versa. The smart contract application [22,27,52] is the most suitable case. The sandboxed execution facilitated by WebAssembly and WAIT is necessary for these applications, and compiling to native code on the cloud enlarges the attack surface.…”

Section: Design Alternatives Of Waitmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing webassembly to resource-constrained iot devices for seamless device-cloud integration

Fan

Gao

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services

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Recent years have witnessed the progressive integration between IoT (Internet of Things) devices and the cloud server, which promotes the efficiency and interoperability of IoT applications. We-bAssembly, known for its performance and portability, is considered a promising technology to bridge the heterogeneity between devices and the server. Nevertheless, resource-constrained devices, which are commonly deployed in the wild, have difficulty participating in this device-cloud integration because they can hardly run WebAssembly efficiently.Hence, we propose WAIT, a lightweight WebAssembly runtime on resource-constrained IoT devices for device-cloud integrated applications. WAIT is the first work to enable the Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation of WebAssembly on resource-constrained devices by leveraging several approaches to reduce memory usage. Moreover, WAIT introduces various safety checks at compile-time to guarantee the sandbox execution of WebAssembly and optimizes energy consumption for IoT devices. Results show that WAIT achieves 84.8× lower RAM usage compared with the state-of-theart WebAssembly AOT runtime, and reduces energy consumption by 1.2×~4.9× while guaranteeing the sandboxed execution of We-bAssembly modules. CCS CONCEPTS• Computer systems organization → Embedded and cyberphysical systems; • Networks → Cloud computing; Network components; • Information systems → Computing platforms.

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“…Similarly, Feng et al 47 presented the state dependency of exploits as summaries and employed symbolic execution to query possible exploits in Solidity smart contracts. WANA 48 detects smart contract vulnerabilities in an alternative blockchain, EOS, whose underlying virtual machine is different from EVM, named Wasm VM. WANA works directly on the Wasm bytecode format of the smart contracts, but due to the lack of Solidity support to Wasm compilers, WANA cannot detect bugs on Solidity smart contracts.…”

Section: Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A large‐scale empirical study of low‐level function use in Ethereum smart contracts and automated replacement

Pattabiraman

2022

Softw Pract Exp

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The Ethereum blockchain stores and executes complex logic via smart contracts written in Solidity, a high‐level programming language. The Solidity language (in its early versions) provides features to exercise fine‐grained control over smart contracts, whose usage is discouraged by later‐released Solidity documentation, but nonetheless supported in later versions for backward compatibility. We define these features as low‐level functions. However, the high‐volume of transactions and the improper use of low‐level functions lead to security exploits with heavy financial loss. Consequently, the documentation suggests secure alternatives to the use of low‐level functions. In this article, we first perform an empirical study on the use of low‐level functions in Ethereum smart contracts. We study a smart contract dataset consisting of over 2,100,000 real‐world smart contracts. We find that low‐level functions are widely used and that the majority of these uses are gratuitous. We then propose GoHigh, a source‐to‐source transformation tool to eliminate low‐level function‐related vulnerabilities, by replacing low‐level functions with secure alternatives. Our experimental evaluation on the dataset shows that GoHigh successfully replaces all low‐level functions with 4.9% fewer compiler warnings. Further, no unintended side‐effects are introduced in 80% of the contracts, and the remaining 20% are not verifiable due to their external dependency. GoHigh saves more than 5% of the gas cost of the contract. Finally, GoHigh takes 7 s on average per contract.

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WANA: Symbolic Execution of Wasm Bytecode for Extensible Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Cited by 19 publications

References 12 publications

Unveiling the Landscape of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: A Detailed Examination and Codification of Vulnerabilities in Prominent Blockchains

Unveiling the Landscape of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: A Detailed Examination and Codification of Vulnerabilities in Prominent Blockchains

Bringing webassembly to resource-constrained iot devices for seamless device-cloud integration

A large‐scale empirical study of low‐level function use in Ethereum smart contracts and automated replacement

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