Qian Ren

Qian Ren, Yingjun Wu, Han Liu et al.

In recent years, the confidentiality of smart contracts has become a fundamental requirement for practical applications. While many efforts have been made to develop architectural capabilities for enforcing confidential smart contracts, a few works arise to extend confidential smart contracts to Multi-Party Computation (MPC), i.e., multiple parties jointly evaluate a transaction off-chain and commit the outputs on-chain without revealing their secret inputs/outputs to each other. However, existing solutions lack public verifiability and require O(n) transactions to enable negotiation or resist adversaries, thus suffering from inefficiency and compromised security. In this paper, we propose Cloak, a framework for enabling Multi-Party Transaction (MPT) on existing blockchains. An MPT refers to transitioning blockchain states by an publicly verifiable off-chain MPC. We identify and handle the challenges of securing MPT by harmonizing TEE and blockchain. Consequently, Cloak secures the off-chain nondeterministic negotiation process (a party joins an MPT without knowing identities or the total number of parties until the MPT proposal settles), achieves public verifiability (the public can validate that the MPT correctly handles the secret inputs/outputs from multiple parties and reads/writes states on-chain), and resists Byzantine adversaries. According to our proof, Cloak achieves better security with only 2 transactions, superior to previous works that achieve compromised security at O(n) transactions cost. By evaluating examples and real-world MPTs, the gas cost of Cloak reduces by 32.4% on average.

Qian Ren, Han Liu, Yue Li et al.

In recent years, as blockchain adoption has been expanding across a wide range of domains, e.g., digital asset, supply chain finance, etc., the confidentiality of smart contracts is now a fundamental demand for practical applications. However, while new privacy protection techniques keep coming out, how existing ones can best fit development settings is little studied. Suffering from limited architectural support in terms of programming interfaces, state-of-the-art solutions can hardly reach general developers. In this paper, we proposed the CLOAK framework for developing confidential smart contracts. The key capability of CLOAK is allowing developers to implement and deploy practical solutions to multi-party transaction (MPT) problems, i.e., transact with secret inputs and states owned by different parties by simply specifying it. To this end, CLOAK introduced a domain-specific annotation language for declaring privacy specifications and further automatically generating confidential smart contracts to be deployed with trusted execution environment (TEE) on blockchain. In our evaluation on both simple and real-world applications, developers managed to deploy business services on blockchain in a concise manner by only developing CLOAK smart contracts whose size is less than 30% of the deployed ones.

Bin Wang, Han Liu, Chao Liu et al.

Decentralized finance, i.e., DeFi, has become the most popular type of application on many public blockchains (e.g., Ethereum) in recent years. Compared to the traditional finance, DeFi allows customers to flexibly participate in diverse blockchain financial services (e.g., lending, borrowing, collateralizing, exchanging etc.) via smart contracts at a relatively low cost of trust. However, the open nature of DeFi inevitably introduces a large attack surface, which is a severe threat to the security of participants funds. In this paper, we proposed BLOCKEYE, a real-time attack detection system for DeFi projects on the Ethereum blockchain. Key capabilities provided by BLOCKEYE are twofold: (1) Potentially vulnerable DeFi projects are identified based on an automatic security analysis process, which performs symbolic reasoning on the data flow of important service states, e.g., asset price, and checks whether they can be externally manipulated. (2) Then, a transaction monitor is installed offchain for a vulnerable DeFi project. Transactions sent not only to that project but other associated projects as well are collected for further security analysis. A potential attack is flagged if a violation is detected on a critical invariant configured in BLOCKEYE, e.g., Benefit is achieved within a very short time and way much bigger than the cost. We applied BLOCKEYE in several popular DeFi projects and managed to discover potential security attacks that are unreported before. A video of BLOCKEYE is available at https://youtu.be/7DjsWBLdlQU.