I am currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. I am under the supervision of Dr. Radu State (University of Luxembourg) and Dr. Arthur Gervais (Imperial College London).
Prior to that, I have worked as an associate researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) in Munich, Germany.
Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that are executed across a blockchain network. Unlike traditional programs, once deployed they cannot be modified. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they become more of an interesting target for attackers. In recent years, smart contracts suffered major exploits, costing millions of dollars, due to programming errors. As a result, a variety of tools for detecting bugs has been proposed. However, majority of these tools often yield many false positives due to over-approximation or poor code coverage due to complex path constraints. Fuzzing or fuzz testing is a popular and effective software testing technique. However, traditional fuzzers tend to be more effective towards finding shallow bugs and less effective in finding bugs that lie deeper in the execution. In this work, we present CONFUZZIUS, a hybrid fuzzer that combines evolutionary fuzzing with constraint solving in order to execute more code and find more bugs in smart contracts. Evolutionary fuzzing is used to exercise shallow parts of a smart contract, while constraint solving is used to generate inputs which satisfy complex conditions that prevent the evolutionary fuzzing from exploring deeper paths. Moreover, we use data dependency analysis to efficiently generate sequences of transactions, that create specific contract states in which bugs may be hidden. We evaluate the effectiveness of our fuzzing strategy, by comparing CONFUZZIUS with state-of-the-art symbolic execution tools and fuzzers. Our evaluation shows that our hybrid fuzzing approach produces significantly better results than state-of-the-art symbolic execution tools and fuzzers.
In recent years, smart contracts have suffered major exploits, costing millions of dollars. Unlike traditional programs, smart contracts are deployed on a blockchain. As such, they cannot be modified once deployed. Though various tools have been proposed to detect vulnerable smart contracts, the majority fails to protect vulnerable contracts that have already been deployed on the blockchain. Only very few solutions have been proposed so far to tackle the issue of post-deployment. However, these solutions suffer from low precision and are not generic enough to prevent any type of attack. In this work, we introduce ÆGIS, a dynamic analysis tool that protects smart contracts from being exploited during runtime. Its capability of detecting new vulnerabilities can easily be extended through so-called attack patterns. These patterns are written in a domain-specific language that is tailored to the execution model of Ethereum smart contracts. The language enables the description of malicious control and data flows. In addition, we propose a novel mechanism to streamline and speed up the process of managing attack patterns. Patterns are voted upon and stored via a smart contract, thus leveraging the benefits of tamper-resistance and transparency provided by the blockchain. We compare ÆGIS to current state-of-the-art tools and demonstrate that our solution achieves higher precision in detecting attacks. Finally, we performa large-scale analysis on the first 4.5 million blocks of the Ethereum blockchain, thereby confirming the occurrences of well reported and yet unreported attacks in the wild.
In recent years, smart contracts have suffered major exploits, losing millions of dollars. Unlike traditional programs, smart contracts cannot be updated once deployed. Though various tools were proposed to detect vulnerable smart contracts, they all fail to protect contracts that have already been deployed on the blockchain. Moreover, they focus on vulnerabilities, but do not address scams (e.g., honeypots). In this work, we introduce ÆGIS, a tool that shields smart contracts and users on the blockchain from being exploited. To this end, ÆGIS reverts transactions in real-time based on pattern matching. These patterns encode the detection of malicious transactions that trigger exploits or scams. New patterns are voted upon and stored via a smart contract, thus leveraging the benefits of tamper-resistance and transparency provided by blockchain. By allowing its protection to be updated, the smart contract acts as a smart shield.
Modern blockchains, such as Ethereum, enable the execution of so-called smart contracts – programs that are executed across a decentralised network of nodes. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they become more of an interesting target for attackers. In the past few years, several smart contracts have been exploited by attackers. However, a new trend towards a more proactive approach seems to be on the rise, where attackers do not search for vulnerable contracts anymore. Instead, they try to lure their victims into traps by deploying seemingly vulnerable contracts that contain hidden traps. This new type of contracts is commonly referred to as honeypots. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of honeypot smart contracts, by investigating their prevalence, behaviour and impact on the Ethereum blockchain. We develop a taxonomy of honeypot techniques and use this to build HoneyBadger – a tool that employs symbolic execution and well defined heuristics to expose honeypots. We perform a large-scale analysis on more than 2 million smart contracts and show that our tool not only achieves high precision, but is also highly efficient. We identify 690 honeypot smart contracts as well as 240 victims in the wild, with an accumulated profit of more than $90,000 for the honeypot creators. Our manual validation shows that 87% of the reported contracts are indeed honeypots.
The capability of executing so-called smart contracts in a decentralised manner is one of the compelling features of modern blockchains. Smart contracts are fully fledged programs which cannot be changed once deployed to the blockchain. They typically implement the business logic of distributed apps and carry billions of dollars worth of coins. In that respect, it is imperative that smart contracts are correct and have no vulnerabilities or bugs. However, research has identified different classes of vulnerabilities in smart contracts, some of which led to prominent multi-million dollar fraud cases. In this paper we focus on vulnerabilities related to integer bugs, a class of bugs that is particularly difficult to avoid due to some characteristics of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the Solidity programming language. In this paper, we introduce Osiris – a framework that combines symbolic execution and taint analysis, in order to accurately find integer bugs in Ethereum smart contracts. Osiris detects a greater range of bugs than existing tools, while providing a better specificity of its detection. We have evaluated its performance on a large experimental dataset containing more than 1.2 million smart contracts. We found that 42,108 contracts contain integer bugs. Besides being able to identify several vulnerabilities that have been reported in the past few months, we were also able to identify a yet unknown critical vulnerability in a couple of smart contracts that are currently deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.
Fingerprinting of browsers has been thoroughly investigated. In contrast, mobile phone applications offer a far wider array of attributes for profiling, yet fingerprinting practices on this platform have hardly received attention. In this paper, we present the first (to our knowledge) investigation of Android libraries by commercial fingerprinters. Interestingly enough, there is a marked difference with fingerprinting desktop browsers. We did not find evidence of typical fingerprinting techniques such as canvas fingerprinting. Secondly, we searched for behaviour resembling that of commercial fingerprinters. We performed a detailed analysis of six similar libraries. Thirdly, we investigated ~30,000 apps and found that roughly 19% of these apps is using one of these libraries. Finally, we checked how often these libraries were used by apps subject to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (i.e. apps targeted explicitly at children), and found that these libraries were included 21 times.
Online tracking of users is used for benign goals, such as detecting fraudulent logins, but also to invade user privacy. We posit that for non-oppressed users, tracking within one website does not have a substantial negative impact on privacy, while it enables legitimate benefits. In contrast, cross-domain tracking negatively impacts user privacy, while being of little benefit to the user. Existing methods to counter fingerprint-based tracking treat cross-domain tracking and regular tracking the same. This often results in hampering or disabling desired functionality, such as embedded videos. By distinguishing between regular and cross-domain tracking, more desired functionality can be preserved. We have developed a prototype tool, FP-Block, that counters cross-domain fingerprint-based tracking while still allowing regular tracking. FP-Block ensures that any embedded party will see a different, unrelatable fingerprint for each site on which it is embedded. Thus, the user’s fingerprint can no longer be tracked across the web, while desired functionality is better preserved compared to existing methods.