Title
Evil Under the Sun: Understanding and Discovering Attacks on Ethereum Decentralized Applications
Abstract
The popularity of Ethereum decentralized applications (Dapps) also brings in new security risks: it has been reported that these Dapps have been under various kinds of attacks from cybercriminals to gain profit. To the best of our knowledge, little has been done so far to understand this new cybercrime, in terms of its scope, criminal footprints and attack operational intents, not to mention any efforts to investigate these attack incidents automatically on a large scale. In this paper, we performed the first measurement study on real-world Dapp attack instances to recover critical threat intelligence (e.g., kill chain and attack patterns). Utilizing such threat intelligence, we proposed the first technique DE-FIER to automatically investigate attack incidents on a large scale. Running DEFIER on 2.3 million transactions from 104 Ethereum on-chain Dapps, we were able to identify 476,342 exploit transactions on 85 target Dapps, which related to 75 0-day victim Dapps and 17K previously-unknown attacker EOAs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest Ethereum on-chain Dapp attack incidents dataset ever reported.
Year
Venue
DocType
2021
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 30TH USENIX SECURITY SYMPOSIUM
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Liya Su142.80
Xinyue Shen201.69
Xiangyu Du301.35
Xiaojing Liao49613.66
Xiaofeng Wang52543161.68
Luyi Xing618712.19
BaoXu Liu702.03