Daniel Perez (Imperial College London), Benjamin Livshits (Imperial College London, UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies, and Brave Software)

Metering is an approach developed to assign cost to smart contract execution in blockchain systems such as Ethereum. This paper presents a detailed investigation of the metering approach based on emph{gas} taken by the Ethereum blockchain. We discover a number of discrepancies in the metering model such as significant inconsistencies in the pricing of the instructions. We further demonstrate that there is very little correlation between the gas and resources such as CPU and memory. We find that the main reason for this is that the gas price is dominated by the amount of emph{storage} that is used.

Based on the observations above, we present a new type of DoS attack we call~emph{Resource Exhaustion Attack}, which uses these imperfections to generate low-throughput contracts. Using this method, we show that we are able to generate contracts with a throughput on average 50 times slower than typical contracts. These contracts can be used to prevent nodes with lower hardware capacity from participating in the network, thereby artificially reducing the level of centralization the network can deliver.

View More Papers

Encrypted DNS –> Privacy? A Traffic Analysis Perspective

Sandra Siby (EPFL), Marc Juarez (University of Southern California), Claudia Diaz (imec-COSIC KU Leuven), Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez (IMDEA Networks Institute), Carmela Troncoso (EPFL)

Read More

EASI: Edge-Based Sender Identification on Resource-Constrained Platforms for Automotive...

Marcel Kneib (Robert Bosch GmbH), Oleg Schell (Bosch Engineering GmbH), Christopher Huth (Robert Bosch GmbH)

Read More

µRAI: Securing Embedded Systems with Return Address Integrity

Naif Saleh Almakhdhub (Purdue University and King Saud University), Abraham A. Clements (Sandia National Laboratories), Saurabh Bagchi (Purdue University), Mathias Payer (EPFL)

Read More

DeepBinDiff: Learning Program-Wide Code Representations for Binary Diffing

Yue Duan (Cornell University), Xuezixiang Li (UC Riverside), Jinghan Wang (UC Riverside), Heng Yin (UC Riverside)

Read More