The Ethereum blockchain has been facing significant security challenges. With billions of dollars locked in smart contracts, ensuring the security of smart contracts is paramount. Although numerous tools exist for bug detection, practical mitigation strategies have been lacking. This led our research group to create HCC (Hardening Contract Compiler), the first practical smart contract compiler that automatically inserts security hardening checks at the source-code level. HCC leverages a language-independent code property graph (CPG) notation, that we model specifically for smart contracts. This approach allows HCC to mitigate the most common and devastating smart contract vulnerabilities, like reentrancy, untrusted delegate-calls, and unchecked low-level calls. A very important key feature of HCC is its transparency for smart contract developers: after analyzing and hardening a smart contract, HCC returns the full source code of the contract. Because of this, HCC retains compatibility with other source code related workflows, including code review practices. We evaluated HCC on real-world smart contracts and showed that HCC is capable of preventing all known attacks. Further, our extensive evaluation on several thousand real-world contracts (without vulnerabilities) demonstrates that HCC fully preserves legitimate behavior. We have also successfully integrated HCC with Hyperledger Fabric, showcasing its versatility across different blockchain platforms.

For more information on HCC, contact Jens-Rene Giesen.

Publication

HCC, the implementation, our experiments and results will be published at ACNS 2025:

Giesen, Jens-Rene; Andreina, Sebastien; Rodler, Michael; Karame, Ghassan; Davi, Lucas: HCC: A Language-Independent Hardening Contract Compiler for Smart Contracts. In: Proc. of 23rd International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS). Springer, Munich, Germany 2025. 

A pre-print of our publication can also be found on arxiv.org: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.00364

Artifacts

We open-source HCC at our GitHub Repository. 

Recently, the Solana blockchain is on the rise. About $4.5 billion is currently locked in Solana. Thus, Solana is a lucrative target for attackers. Wormhole, a famous cross-chain protocol, was attacked and exploited for $326 million in early 2022. This leads us to the question of how bugs can be found before exploitation on Solana. While Ethereum has extensive tooling for bug detection, we cannot use the same tools on Solana. Solana smart contracts have vastly different structure than Ethereum contracts. For instance, Solana programs do not store the state of the execution, which has to be provided by the user. Thus, a user has full control over every state of the execution. As the structure of smart contracts is different, the set of bugs that can occur differs as well. Hence, Ethereum's bug detection is useless on Solana. Therefore, our research group created Solana's first fuzzer, FuzzDelSol, that tackles Solana's unique account structure and detects bugs in the Solana VM. FuzzDelSol can detect numerous bug types and showed promising results in detecting bugs in the wild. We found nearly 100 potential bugs in contracts without their source code, which is often unavailable for smart contracts.

For more information on FuzzDelSol, contact Jens-Rene Giesen.

Publication

FuzzDelSol, our experiments and results are described in our paper at CCS 2023:

Smolka, Sven; Giesen, Jens-Rene; Winkler, Pascal; Draissi, Oussama; Davi, Lucas; Karame, Ghassan; Pohl, Klaus: Fuzz on the Beach: Fuzzing Solana Smart Contracts. In: Proc. of the 30th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer & Communications Security (CCS). ACM, Copenhagen, Denmark 2023.

A pre-print of our CCS publication can also be found on arxiv.org: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03006

Developers must react quickly on discovered security vulnerabilities and deploy patches. This is especially true for smart contracts, because they are always online and always available due to the distributed nature of the blockchain. But corrections rarely happen. Our analyses of the Ethereum blockchain have shown that vulnerable smart contracts are often continued to be used by unsuspecting users, even though security problems in these contracts were made public months before. Often no action is taken to terminate or remedy these smart contracts. A probable reason is that the manual correction procedures currently available are time-consuming and error-prone. Our research group, together with NEC Laboratories Europe, has therefore developed a framework that helps developers to fix errors automatically. For this purpose, the new patching framework features a so-called bytecode rewriter. Independent of the used programming language and compiler, it patches common Ethereum smart contracts by rewriting their byte code. Additionally EVMPatch deploys differential testing on prior transactions from the blockchain to test the introduced patches.

For more information on EVMPatch, contact Michael Rodler.

Publication

EVMPatch, our experiments and results are described in our upcoming paper at USENIX Security 2021:

Rodler, Michael; Li, Wenting; Karame, Ghassan O.; Davi, Lucas: EVMPatch: Timely and Automated Patching of Ethereum Smart Contracts. In: Proc. of 30th USENIX Security Symposium. USENIX Association, Vancouver, B.C., Canada 2021.

A pre-print of our upcoming USENIX Security publication can be found on arxiv.org: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.00341

Artifacts

To assess the practicality of patching Ethereum smart contract with and without EVMPatch we performed a developer study and asked several developers to perform common patching tasks.
The results are summarized in our paper. The questionnaire, study manual and the smart contracts we used can be found on github: github.com/uni-due-syssec/evmpatch-developer-study

We also released the raw data of our evaluation on github:
https://github.com/uni-due-syssec/evmpatch-eval-data

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 project, we address this problem and develop a novel smart contract security technology, called Sereum (Secure Ethereum), which protects existing, deployed contracts in a backwards compatible way based on run-time monitoring and validation.

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 re-entrancy attacks with a false positive rate as small as 0.06% and with negligible run-time overhead.

For more information on Sereum, contact Michael Rodler.

Publication

Rodler, M., Li, W., Karame, G. O., & Davi, L. (2019). Sereum: Protecting Existing Smart Contracts Against Re-Entrancy Attacks. 26th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2019, San Diego, California, USA, February 24-27, 2019.
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/sereum-protecting-existing-smart-contracts-against-re-entrancy-attacks/

You can find our paper also on the arxiv.org preprint server arxiv.org

Artifacts

During the development of Sereum, we identified several re-entrancy attack patterns, which are not covered by existing analysis tools. Source code of example contracts and attacks can be found on github.com/uni-due-syssec/eth-reentrancy-attack-patterns  

You can find the raw data of replaying (almost) all transactions in all blocks up to block 8 million of the Ethereum mainnnet with Sereum also on github: github.com/uni-due-syssec/sereum-results

Our paper Sereum: Protecting Existing Smart Contracts Against Re-Entrancy Attacks attracted attention of various new portals. You can find a (non-exhaustive) list of media portals covering our research here:

• uni-due.de
• uk.nec.com
• idw-online.de
• wallstreet-online.de
• computerwelt.at
• dotnetpro.de
• cps-hub-nrw.de
• wissenschaftsstadt-essen.de
• heinz-schmitz.org
• presseportal.de
• coin-hero.de
• krypto-nachrichten
• digitales.nrw
• blockchainwelt.de
• it-daily.net