Securify: Practical security analysis of smart contracts

Petar Tsankov, Andrei Dan, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Arthur Gervais, Florian Bünzli, Martin Vechev

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Permissionless blockchains allow the execution of arbitrary programs (called smart contracts), enabling mutually untrusted entities to interact without relying on trusted third parties. Despite their potential, repeated security concerns have shaken the trust in handling billions of USD by smart contracts. To address this problem, we present Securify, a security analyzer for Ethereum smart contracts that is scalable, fully automated, and able to prove contract behaviors as safe/unsafe with respect to a given property. Securify’s analysis consists of two steps. First, it symbolically analyzes the contract’s dependency graph to extract precise semantic information from the code. Then, it checks compliance and violation patterns that capture sufficient conditions for proving if a property holds or not. To enable extensibility, all patterns are specified in a designated domain-specific language. Securify is publicly released, it has analyzed > 18K contracts submitted by its users, and is regularly used to conduct security audits by experts. We present an extensive evaluation of Securify over real-world Ethereum smart contracts and demonstrate that it can effectively prove the correctness of smart contracts and discover critical violations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCCS 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Pages67-82
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356930
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Oct 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2018 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 15 Oct 2018 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Conference

Conference25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period15/10/18 → …

Keywords

  • Security analysis
  • Smart contracts
  • Stratified Datalog

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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