TY - JOUR
T1 - SRP
T2 - An Efficient Runtime Protection Framework for Blockchain-based Smart Contracts
AU - Ali, Isra M.
AU - Lasla, Noureddine
AU - Abdallah, Mohamed M.
AU - Erbad, Aiman
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors
PY - 2023/7
Y1 - 2023/7
N2 - Runtime-verification of smart contracts ensures the absence of exploitations within a transaction during execution. It is a crucial security aspect that is often omitted due to its high onchain overhead. The lack of runtime-verification in public blockchains allowed attackers to compromise vulnerable contracts and cause significant monetary losses. Although several runtime protection solutions have been proposed, they do not discuss the onchain overhead limitation, which may hinder their deployment and undermine their effectiveness. To address this problem, we propose an efficient Smart contract Runtime Protection framework, called SRP, that minimizes the onchain burden of runtime-verification by integrating an off-chain mechanism with onchain contract execution. The proposed hybrid architecture is designed to protect already-deployed smart contracts from attacks in real-time while maintaining the throughput of the underlying blockchain. We first present SRP from a design perspective proposing a protocol customized for off-chain runtime-verification interoperability. Then, we evaluate our approach empirically and demonstrate the applicability of SRP using a proof-of-concept implementation on a local instance of the Ethereum network. Our empirical and experimental results indicate the feasibility and efficiency of our approach, where SRP outperforms the onchain-only mechanism in terms of service time and throughput, for increasing workloads.
AB - Runtime-verification of smart contracts ensures the absence of exploitations within a transaction during execution. It is a crucial security aspect that is often omitted due to its high onchain overhead. The lack of runtime-verification in public blockchains allowed attackers to compromise vulnerable contracts and cause significant monetary losses. Although several runtime protection solutions have been proposed, they do not discuss the onchain overhead limitation, which may hinder their deployment and undermine their effectiveness. To address this problem, we propose an efficient Smart contract Runtime Protection framework, called SRP, that minimizes the onchain burden of runtime-verification by integrating an off-chain mechanism with onchain contract execution. The proposed hybrid architecture is designed to protect already-deployed smart contracts from attacks in real-time while maintaining the throughput of the underlying blockchain. We first present SRP from a design perspective proposing a protocol customized for off-chain runtime-verification interoperability. Then, we evaluate our approach empirically and demonstrate the applicability of SRP using a proof-of-concept implementation on a local instance of the Ethereum network. Our empirical and experimental results indicate the feasibility and efficiency of our approach, where SRP outperforms the onchain-only mechanism in terms of service time and throughput, for increasing workloads.
KW - Blockchain
KW - Concurrent execution
KW - Off-chain processing
KW - Runtime verification
KW - Smart contract
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85159433798&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jnca.2023.103658
DO - 10.1016/j.jnca.2023.103658
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85159433798
SN - 1084-8045
VL - 216
JO - Journal of Network and Computer Applications
JF - Journal of Network and Computer Applications
M1 - 103658
ER -