Ting Chen (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Rong Cao (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Ting Li (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Xiapu Luo (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Guofei Gu (Texas A&M University), Yufei Zhang (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Zhou Liao (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Hang Zhu (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Gang Chen (Chengdu Kongdi Technology Inc.), Zheyuan He (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Yuxing Tang (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Xiaodong Lin (University of Guelph), Xiaosong Zhang (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China)
Smart contracts have become lucrative and profitable targets for attackers because they can hold a great amount of money. Although there are already many studies to discover the vulnerabilities in smart contracts, they can neither guarantee discovering all vulnerabilities nor protect the deployed smart ontracts against the attacks, because they rely on offline analysis. Recently, a few online protection approaches appeared but they only focus on specific attacks and cannot be easily extended to defend against other attacks. Developing a new online protection system for smart contracts from scratch is time-consuming and requires being familiar with the internals of smart contract runtime, thus making it difficult to quickly implement and deploy mechanisms to defend against new attacks.
In this paper, we propose a novel generic runtime protection framework named SPA for smart contracts on any blockchains that support Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). SPA distinguishes itself from existing online protection approaches through its capability, efficiency, and compatibility. First, SPA empowers users to easily develop and deploy protection apps for defending against various attacks by separating the information collection, attack detection and reaction with layered design. At the higher layer, SPA provides unified interfaces to develop protection apps gainst various attacks. At the lower layer, SPA instruments EVM to collect all primitive information necessary to detect various attacks and constructs 11 kinds of structural information for the ease of developing protection apps.
Based on SPA, users can develop new rotection apps in a few lines of code without modifying EVM and easily deploy them to the blockchain. Second, SPA is efficient, because we design on-demand information retrieval to reduce the overhead of information collection and adopt dynamic linking to eliminate the overhead of inter-process communication (IPC). It allows users to develop protection apps by using any programming languages that can generate dynamic link libraries (DLLs). Third, since more and more blockchains adopt EVM as smart contract runtime, SPA can be easily migrated to such blockchains without modifying the protection apps. Based on SPA, we develop 8 protection apps to defend against the attacks exploiting major vulnerabilities in smart contracts, and integrate SPA (including all protection apps) into 3 popular blockchains: Ethereum, Expanse and Wanchain. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SPA and our protection apps.