A Comprehensive Study of Exploitable Patterns in Smart Contracts: From Vulnerability to Defense
This addresses security challenges for blockchain developers and users, but it is incremental as it focuses on known vulnerabilities without introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of security vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts, specifically analyzing reentrancy and integer overflow vulnerabilities, and assesses countermeasures to mitigate these risks.
With the rapid advancement of blockchain technology, smart contracts have enabled the implementation of increasingly complex functionalities. However, ensuring the security of smart contracts remains a persistent challenge across the stages of development, compilation, and execution. Vulnerabilities within smart contracts not only undermine the security of individual applications but also pose significant risks to the broader blockchain ecosystem, as demonstrated by the growing frequency of attacks since 2016, resulting in substantial financial losses. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of key security risks in Ethereum smart contracts, specifically those written in Solidity and executed on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). We focus on two prevalent and critical vulnerability types (reentrancy and integer overflow) by examining their underlying mechanisms, replicating attack scenarios, and assessing effective countermeasures.