BH18: Blockchain Autopsies - Analyzing Ethereum Smart Contract Deaths

Jay Little, Principal Security Engineer, Trail of Bits
Trail of Bits is a cyber security research company - high end security research and assesments.

Earlier this year he was working on a project with a friend to look into an aspects of contracts

Ethereum, EVM and Solidty

Ask for a show of hands about who has bought Ethereum here, lots of hands went up.

Ethereum is a blockchain based distributed ledger, called a "world computer" and has "smart" contracts. It is the 2nd largest crypto currency.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a big endian stack machine with 185 opcodes, native data width is 256 bits, whith many similar instructions. Each instruction has a 'gas cost' to prevent infinite loops.

Most contracts start at 0, there are 5 addresse spaces. Most people don't write their contracts in EVM, but use Solidty instead - it's a JavaScript inspired high level language for smart contracts. It has evolved (as opposed to being designed).

Much of the presentation is done with emoji's - easier to see than a string of numbers :-)

 Because contracts start at zero, he has seen undefined behaviors when counters get decremented too low.  ALso issues with unintialized variables - used in one case to backdoor a lottery system.

There is a new tool, Rattle, recovers EVM control flow.  Other tools, Geth and Party, run on public nodes. This followed by a walkthrough of using the tools and their CLI options and looking at a some contracts.  He shared the code for finding contracts as well.  Geth and Parity have a lot of issues, so he's been looking at etherscna.io - a quick lookup database.

Doing a hybrid approach of using Geth and Parity to find the contracts over a few hours, then look into eherium.io.  Looking at 6M blocks, about half are duplicates. Some are empty, but have a balance - which shouldn't happen.

Sometimes the contracts fail, because they did not use enough 'gas' . Found a contract with no code (unusable) but with about $7000 in it - stuck there forever.  All told, there is about $2.6M stuck in empty contracts that can never be retrieved.

Some duplicates have infinite loops - could be intended as a network DoS. Others seen with noise or spam, or NUL value issues

From tracing they were able to look into contracts where the self destruct was not the original creator - they tend to send the money to address 0, losing it forever. 

If you are developing contracts, make sure you understand and fix all warnings. Add an Echnidan test and write extensive positive and negative tests. Most importantly, perform a rigorous assessment!