Echidna: effective, usable, and fast fuzzing for smart contracts

Grieco, Gustavo; Song, Will; Cygan, Artur; Feist, Josselin; Groce, Alex

doi:10.1145/3395363.3404366

Cited by 100 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“… 173 , 177 , 178 , 179 , 180 , 181 Design tools for Turing-complete blockchains . Apart from commonly used techniques such as symbolic execution, 89 , 115 , 116 , 117 , 118 , 119 , 120 , 121 , 122 , 123 the fuzzing test 137 , 138 , 139 is another prevalent technique. Lightweight and scalable security analysis could be further considered to meet the potential need for the growth of contract size.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 94 makes a classification of 246 defects found in 23 Ethereum smart contracts. They utilize several open-sourced analysis tools (i.e., Slither, 131 Manticore, 118 and Echidna, 139 see Section 5.2.1 ) along with manual auditing, and find that there are ten defects per contract on average.…”

Section: Constructing Smart Contracts With Turing-complete Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To support user-defined analysis, the tool Echidna 139 is proposed. It checks user-defined properties and assertions, and further estimates the worst-case gas consumption for the contracts.…”

Section: Constructing Smart Contracts With Turing-complete Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

Zhang

Liu

et al. 2021

Patterns

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Summary Smart contracts are regarded as one of the most promising and appealing notions in blockchain technology. Their self-enforcing and event-driven features make some online activities possible without a trusted third party. Nevertheless, problems such as miscellaneous attacks, privacy leakage, and low processing rates prevent them from being widely applied. Various schemes and tools have been proposed to facilitate the construction and execution of secure smart contracts. However, a comprehensive survey for these proposals is absent, hindering new researchers and developers from a quick start. This paper surveys the literature and online resources on smart contract construction and execution over the period 2008–2020. We divide the studies into three categories: (1) design paradigms that give examples and patterns on contract construction, (2) design tools that facilitate the development of secure smart contracts, and (3) extensions and alternatives that improve the privacy or efficiency of the system. We start by grouping the relevant construction schemes into the first two categories. We then review the execution mechanisms in the last category and further divide the state-of-the-art solutions into three classes: private contracts with extra tools, off-chain channels, and extensions on core functionalities. Finally, we summarize several challenges and identify future research directions toward developing secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient smart contracts.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Constructing Smart Contracts With Turing-complete Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

Zhang

Liu

et al. 2021

Patterns

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“…Echidna [11], [12] is an open-source, easy-to-use, propertybased fuzz testing tool for Ethereum smart contracts, developed and used by Trail of Bits. Instead of using a predefined set of rules to detect vulnerabilities, it supports userdefined properties for property-based testing [30], arbitrary…”

Section: A Echidnamentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Countermeasures for Verifying the Integrity of Ethereum Smart Contract Applications

Kim

2021

IEEE Access

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Blockchain technology, which provides digital security in a distributed manner, has evolved into a key technology that can build efficient and reliable decentralized applications (called DApps) beyond the function of cryptocurrency. The characteristics of blockchain such as immutability and openness, however, have made DApps more vulnerable to various security risks, and thus it has become of great significance to validate the integrity of DApps before they actually operate upon blockchain. Recently, research on vulnerability in smart contracts (a building block of DApps) has been actively conducted, and various vulnerabilities and their countermeasures were reported. However, the effectiveness of such countermeasures has not been studied well, and no appropriate methods have been proposed to evaluate them. In this paper, we propose a software tool that can easily perform comparative studies by adding existing/new countermeasures and labeled smart contract codes. The proposed tool demonstrates verification performance using various statistical indicators, which helps to identify the most effective countermeasures for each type of vulnerability. Using the proposed tool, we evaluated state-of-the-art countermeasures with 237 labeled benchmark codes. The results indicate that for certain types of vulnerabilities, some countermeasures show evenly good performance scores on various metrics. However, it is also observed that countermeasures that detect the largest number of vulnerable codes typically generate much more false positives, resulting in very low precision and accuracy. Consequently, under given constraints, different countermeasures may be recommended for detecting vulnerabilities of interest. We believe that the proposed tool could effectively be utilized for a future verification study of smart contract applications and contribute to the development of practical and secure smart contract applications.INDEX TERMS Blockchain, countermeasure, Ethereum, smart contract, vulnerability I. INTRODUCTION

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“…Program Analysis for Ethereum Smart Contracts. The small size and high value of Ethereum smart contracts has made them a suitable target for applying a variety of program analysis techniques, resulting in a plethora of academic [Brent et al 2020;Grech et al 2018;Kolluri et al 2019;Lagouvardos et al 2020;Luu et al 2016;Nguyen et al 2020;Nikolić et al 2018;Torres et al 2019;Tsankov et al 2018] and industrial Grieco et al 2020;Honig 2020;Mossberg et al 2019; The Certora team 2017] tools emerging. While most smart contract tools focus on vulnerability detection, past work has also focused on empirically identifying optimization opportunities [Chen et al 2020], gas cost estimation [Albert et al 2020a] using recurrence-relation theories or even superoptimization [Albert et al 2020b] using SMT.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symbolic value-flow static analysis: deep, precise, complete modeling of Ethereum smart contracts

Smaragdakis

Grech

Lagouvardos

et al. 2021

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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We present a static analysis approach that combines concrete values and symbolic expressions. This symbolic value-flow (“symvalic”) analysis models program behavior with high precision, e.g., full path sensitivity. To achieve deep modeling of program semantics, the analysis relies on a symbiotic relationship between a traditional static analysis fixpoint computation and a symbolic solver: the solver does not merely receive a complex “path condition” to solve, but is instead invoked repeatedly (often tens or hundreds of thousands of times), in close cooperation with the flow computation of the analysis. The result of the symvalic analysis architecture is a static modeling of program behavior that is much more complete than symbolic execution, much more precise than conventional static analysis, and domain-agnostic: no special-purpose definition of anti-patterns is necessary in order to compute violations of safety conditions with high precision. We apply the analysis to the domain of Ethereum smart contracts. This domain represents a fundamental challenge for program analysis approaches: despite numerous publications, research work has not been effective at uncovering vulnerabilities of high real-world value. In systematic comparison of symvalic analysis with past tools, we find significantly increased completeness (shown as 83-96% statement coverage and more true error reports) combined with much higher precision, as measured by rate of true positive reports. In terms of real-world impact, since the beginning of 2021, the analysis has resulted in the discovery and disclosure of several critical vulnerabilities, over funds in the many millions of dollars. Six separate bug bounties totaling over $350K have been awarded for these disclosures.

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Echidna: effective, usable, and fast fuzzing for smart contracts

Cited by 100 publications

References 12 publications

A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution: paradigms, tools, and systems

Evaluating Countermeasures for Verifying the Integrity of Ethereum Smart Contract Applications

Symbolic value-flow static analysis: deep, precise, complete modeling of Ethereum smart contracts

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