ETHBMC: A Bounded Model Checker for Smart Contracts

The introduction of smart contracts has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in cryptocurrencies. Smart contracts are programs who live on the blockchain, governing the flow of money. However, the promise of monetary gain has attracted miscreants, resulting in spectacular hacks which resulted in the loss of millions worth of currency. In response, several powerful static analysis tools were developed to address these problems. We surveyed eight recently proposed static analyzers for Ethereum smart contracts and found that none of them captures all relevant features of the Ethereum ecosystem. For example, we discovered that a precise memory model is missing and inter-contract analysis is only partially supported.

Based on these insights, we present the design and implementation of, a bounded model checker based on symbolic execution which provides a precise model of the Ethereum network. We demonstrate its capabilities in a series of experiments. First, we compare against the eight aforementioned tools, showing that even relatively simple toy examples can obstruct other analyzers. Further proving that precise modeling is indispensable, we leverage ETHBmc capabilities for automatic vulnerability scanning. We perform a large-scale analysis of roughly 2.2 million accounts currently active on the blockchain and automatically generate 5,905 valid inputs which trigger a vulnerability. From these, 1,989 can destroy a contract at will (so called suicidal contracts) and the rest can be used by an adversary to arbitrarily extract money. Finally, we compare our large-scale analysis against two previous analysis runs, finding significantly more inputs (22.8%) than previous approaches.