SESCon: Secure Ethereum Smart Contracts by Vulnerable Patterns’ Detection

• Published in: Security and communication networks 2021-09, Vol.2021, p.1-14
• Main Authors: Ali, Amir, Abideen, Zain Ul, Ullah, Kalim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analyzers; Blockchain; Contracts; Cryptography; Digital currencies; Domains; Source code; Standardization; Supply chains; Taxonomy
• ISSN: 1939-0114; 1939-0122
• DOI: 10.1155/2021/2897565

Ethereum smart contracts have been gaining popularity toward the automation of so many domains, i.e., FinTech, IoT, and supply chain, which are based on blockchain technology. The most critical domain, e.g., FinTech, has been targeted by so many successful attacks due to its financial worth of billions of dollars. In all attacks, the vulnerability in the source code of smart contracts is being exploited and causes the steal of millions of dollars. To find the vulnerability in the source code of smart contracts written in Solidity language, a state-of-the-art work provides a lot of solutions based on dynamic or static analysis. However, these tools have shown a lot of false positives/negatives against the smart contracts having complex logic. Furthermore, the output of these tools is not reported in a standard way with their actual vulnerability names as per standards defined by the Ethereum community. To solve these problems, we have introduced a static analysis tool, SESCon (secure Ethereum smart contract), applying the taint analysis techniques with XPath queries. Our tool outperforms other analyzers and detected up to 90% of the known vulnerability patterns. SESCon also reports the detected vulnerabilities with their titles, descriptions, and remediations as per defined standards by the Ethereum community. SESCon will serve as a foundation for the standardization of vulnerability detection.