Ethainter: a smart contract security analyzer for composite vulnerabilities

Abstract

Smart contracts on permissionless blockchains are exposed to inherent security risks due to interactions with untrusted entities. Static analyzers are essential for identifying security risks and avoiding millions of dollars worth of damage. We introduce Ethainter, a security analyzer checking information flow with data sanitization in smart contracts. Ethainter identifies composite attacks that involve an escalation of tainted information, through multiple transactions, leading to severe violations. The analysis scales to the entire blockchain, consisting of hundreds of thousands of unique smart contracts, deployed over millions of accounts. Ethainter is more precise than previous approaches, as we confirm by automatic exploit generation (e.g., destroying over 800 contracts on the Ropsten network) and by manual inspection, showing a very high precision of 82.5% valid warnings for end-to-end vulnerabilities. Ethainter’s balance of precision and completeness offers significant advantages over other tools such as Securify, Securify2, and teEther.