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MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in Ethereum smart contracts

Authors:

Anton Jurisevic,

Bernhard Scholz,

Yannis SmaragdakisAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 2, Issue OOPSLA

Article No.: 116, Pages 1 - 27

https://doi.org/10.1145/3276486

Published: 24 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Ethereum is a distributed blockchain platform, serving as an ecosystem for smart contracts: full-fledged inter-communicating programs that capture the transaction logic of an account. Unlike programs in mainstream languages, a gas limit restricts the execution of an Ethereum smart contract: execution proceeds as long as gas is available. Thus, gas is a valuable resource that can be manipulated by an attacker to provoke unwanted behavior in a victim's smart contract (e.g., wasting or blocking funds of said victim). Gas-focused vulnerabilities exploit undesired behavior when a contract (directly or through other interacting contracts) runs out of gas. Such vulnerabilities are among the hardest for programmers to protect against, as out-of-gas behavior may be uncommon in non-attack scenarios and reasoning about it is far from trivial.

In this paper, we classify and identify gas-focused vulnerabilities, and present MadMax: a static program analysis technique to automatically detect gas-focused vulnerabilities with very high confidence. Our approach combines a control-flow-analysis-based decompiler and declarative program-structure queries. The combined analysis captures high-level domain-specific concepts (such as "dynamic data structure storage" and "safely resumable loops") and achieves high precision and scalability. MadMax analyzes the entirety of smart contracts in the Ethereum blockchain in just 10 hours (with decompilation timeouts in 8% of the cases) and flags contracts with a (highly volatile) monetary value of over $2.8B as vulnerable. Manual inspection of a sample of flagged contracts shows that 81% of the sampled warnings do indeed lead to vulnerabilities, which we report on in our experiment.

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Wei ZSun JZhang ZZhang XYang XZhu L(2024)Survey on Quality Assurance of Smart ContractsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/369586457:2(1-36)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2024
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Index Terms

MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in Ethereum smart contracts
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Volume 2, Issue OOPSLA

November 2018

1656 pages

EISSN:2475-1421

DOI:10.1145/3288538

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Copyright © 2018 Owner/Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 October 2018

Published in PACMPL Volume 2, Issue OOPSLA

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Cited By

Zaazaa OEl Bakkali H(2024)SmartLLMSentry: A Comprehensive LLM Based Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection FrameworkJournal of Metaverse10.57019/jmv.1489060Online publication date: 31-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.57019/jmv.1489060
Xiao MXu YLi ZWan H(2024)Advanced Security Auditing Methods for Solidity-Based Smart ContractsElectronics10.3390/electronics1320409313:20(4093)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13204093
Wei ZSun JZhang ZZhang XYang XZhu L(2024)Survey on Quality Assurance of Smart ContractsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/369586457:2(1-36)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3695864
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