Evil under the sun: Understanding and discovering attacks on ethereum decentralized applications

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The popularity of Ethereum decentralized applications (Dapps) also brings in new security risks: it has been reported that these Dapps have been under various kinds of attacks from cybercriminals to gain profit. To the best of our knowledge, little has been done so far to understand this new cybercrime, in terms of its scope, criminal footprints and attack operational intents, not to mention any efforts to investigate these attack incidents automatically on a large scale. In this paper, we performed the first measurement study on real-world Dapp attack instances to recover critical threat intelligence (e.g., kill chain and attack patterns). Utilizing such threat intelligence, we proposed the first technique DEFIER to automatically investigate attack incidents on a large scale. Running DEFIER on 2.3 million transactions from 104 Ethereum on-chain Dapps, we were able to identify 476,342 exploit transactions on 85 target Dapps, which related to 75 0-day victim Dapps and 17K previously-unknown attacker EOAs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest Ethereum on-chain Dapp attack incidents dataset ever reported.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages1307-1324
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)9781939133243
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event30th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: Aug 11 2021Aug 13 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium

Conference

Conference30th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period8/11/218/13/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Evil under the sun: Understanding and discovering attacks on ethereum decentralized applications'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this