Michael Rodler (University of Duisburg-Essen), Wenting Li (NEC Laboratories, Germany), Ghassan O. Karame (NEC Laboratories, Germany), Lucas Davi (University of Duisburg-Essen)

Recently, a number of existing blockchain systems have witnessed major bugs and vulnerabilities within smart contracts. Although the literature features a number of proposals for securing smart contracts, these proposals mostly focus on proving the correctness or absence of a certain type of vulnerability within a contract, but cannot protect deployed (legacy) contracts from being exploited.
In this paper, we address this problem in the context of re-entrancy exploits and propose a novel smart contract security technology, dubbed Sereum (Secure Ethereum), which protects existing, deployed contracts against re-entrancy attacks in a backwards compatible way based on run-time monitoring and validation. Sereum does neither require any modification nor any semantic knowledge of existing contracts. By means of implementation and evaluation using the Ethereum blockchain, we show that Sereum covers the actual execution flow of a smart contract to accurately detect and prevent
attacks with a false positive rate as small as 0.06% and with negligible
run-time overhead. As a by-product, we develop three advanced re-entrancy attacks to demonstrate the limitations of existing offline vulnerability analysis tools.

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Shiqi Shen (National University of Singapore), Shweta Shinde (National University of Singapore), Soundarya Ramesh (National University of Singapore), Abhik Roychoudhury (National University of Singapore), Prateek Saxena (National University of Singapore)

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Anrin Chakraborti (Stony Brook University), Adam J. Aviv (United States Naval Academy), Seung Geol Choi (United States Naval Academy), Travis Mayberry (United States Naval Academy), Daniel S. Roche (United States Naval Academy), Radu Sion (Stony Brook University)

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A. Theodore Markettos (University of Cambridge), Colin Rothwell (University of Cambridge), Brett F. Gutstein (Rice University), Allison Pearce (University of Cambridge), Peter G. Neumann (SRI International), Simon W. Moore (University of Cambridge), Robert N. M. Watson (University of Cambridge)

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Nicolás Rosner (University of California, Santa Barbara), Ismet Burak Kadron (University of California, Santa Barbara), Lucas Bang (Harvey Mudd College), Tevfik Bultan (University of California, Santa Barbara)

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