Qingze Hum

Qingze Hum, Wei Jin Tan, Shi Ying Tey et al.

Cryptocurrencies have become very popular in recent years. Thousands of new cryptocurrencies have emerged, proposing new and novel techniques that improve on Bitcoin's core innovation of the blockchain data structure and consensus mechanism. However, cryptocurrencies are a major target for cyber-attacks, as they can be sold on exchanges anonymously and most cryptocurrencies have their codebases publicly available. One particular issue is the prevalence of code clones in cryptocurrencies, which may amplify security threats. If a vulnerability is found in one cryptocurrency, it might be propagated into other cloned cryptocurrencies. In this work, we propose a systematic remedy to this problem, and we propose CoinWatch (CW). Given a reported vulnerability at the input, CW uses the code evolution analysis and a clone detection technique for indication of cryptocurrencies that might be vulnerable. We applied CW on 1094 cryptocurrencies using 4 CVEs and obtained 786 true vulnerabilities present in 384 projects, which were confirmed with developers and successfully reported as CVE extensions.

Ivan Homoliak, Sarad Venugopalan, Qingze Hum et al.

Blockchains are distributed systems, in which security is a critical factor for their success. However, despite their increasing popularity and adoption, there is a lack of standardized models that study blockchain-related security threats. To fill this gap, the main focus of our work is to systematize and extend the knowledge about the security and privacy aspects of blockchains and contribute to the standardization of this domain. We propose the security reference architecture (SRA) for blockchains, which adopts a stacked model (similar to the ISO/OSI) describing the nature and hierarchy of various security and privacy aspects. The SRA contains four layers: (1) the network layer, (2) the consensus layer, (3) the replicated state machine layer, and (4) the application layer. At each of these layers, we identify known security threats, their origin, and countermeasures, while we also analyze several cross-layer dependencies. Next, to enable better reasoning about security aspects of blockchains by the practitioners, we propose a blockchain-specific version of the threat-risk assessment standard ISO/IEC 15408 by embedding the stacked model into this standard. Finally, we provide designers of blockchain platforms and applications with a design methodology following the model of SRA and its hierarchy.

Ivan Homoliak, Sarad Venugopalan, Qingze Hum et al.

Due to their interesting features, blockchains have become popular in recent years. They are full-stack systems where security is a critical factor for their success. The main focus of this work is to systematize knowledge about security and privacy issues of blockchains. To this end, we propose a security reference architecture based on models that demonstrate the stacked hierarchy of various threats (similar to the ISO/OSI hierarchy) as well as threat-risk assessment using ISO/IEC 15408. In contrast to the previous surveys, we focus on the categorization of security incidents based on their origins and using the proposed architecture we present existing prevention and mitigation techniques. The scope of our work mainly covers aspects related to the decentralized nature of blockchains, while we mention common operational security issues and countermeasures only tangentially.

Vincent Chia, Pieter Hartel, Qingze Hum et al.

Blockchain technology has become almost as famous for incidents involving security breaches as for its innovative potential. We shed light on the prevalence and nature of these incidents through a database structured using the STIX format. Apart from OPSEC-related incidents, we find that the nature of many incidents is specific to blockchain technology. Two categories stand out: smart contracts, and techno-economic protocol incentives. For smart contracts, we propose to use recent advances in software testing to find flaws before deployment. For protocols, we propose the PRESTO framework that allows us to compare different protocols within a five-dimensional framework.