TY - JOUR
T1 - Securing Deployed Smart Contracts and DeFi With Distributed TEE Cluster
AU - Li, Zecheng
AU - Xiao, Bin
AU - Guo, Songtao
AU - Yang, Yuanyuan
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by Key-Area Research Development Program of Guangdong Provice under Grant 2020B0101090003, in part by HK RGC GRF under Grants PolyU 15209822 and PolyU 15217321.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1990-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2023/3/1
Y1 - 2023/3/1
N2 - Smart contract technologies can be used to implement almost arbitrary business logic. They can revolutionize many businesses such as payments, insurance, and crowdfunding. The resulting birth of decentralized finance (DeFi) has gained significant momentum. Smart contracts and DeFi are now attractive targets for attacks. An important research question is how to protect deployed smart contracts and DeFi. Smart contracts cannot be modified once deployed, namely vulnerabilities cannot be fixed by patching. In this case, vulnerabilities in deployed contracts and DeFi might cause devastating consequences. In this paper, we put forward SolSaviour, a framework for protecting deployed smart contracts and DeFi. The core of SolSaviour is to build a smart contract protection mechanism based on democratic voting using a distributed trusted execution environment (TEE) cluster. Once a vulnerability in deployed contracts or DeFi is found, SolSaviour can destroy the defective contract and redeploy a patched contract via the distributed TEE cluster. Moreover, SolSaviour can migrate funds and state variables from the destroyed contract to the patched one. Compared with previous work, our approach can protect smart contracts and DeFi in a distributed manner, avoiding reliance on privileged users or trusted third parties. Our experiment results show that SolSaviour can protect smart contracts and complex DeFi protocols with feasible overhead.
AB - Smart contract technologies can be used to implement almost arbitrary business logic. They can revolutionize many businesses such as payments, insurance, and crowdfunding. The resulting birth of decentralized finance (DeFi) has gained significant momentum. Smart contracts and DeFi are now attractive targets for attacks. An important research question is how to protect deployed smart contracts and DeFi. Smart contracts cannot be modified once deployed, namely vulnerabilities cannot be fixed by patching. In this case, vulnerabilities in deployed contracts and DeFi might cause devastating consequences. In this paper, we put forward SolSaviour, a framework for protecting deployed smart contracts and DeFi. The core of SolSaviour is to build a smart contract protection mechanism based on democratic voting using a distributed trusted execution environment (TEE) cluster. Once a vulnerability in deployed contracts or DeFi is found, SolSaviour can destroy the defective contract and redeploy a patched contract via the distributed TEE cluster. Moreover, SolSaviour can migrate funds and state variables from the destroyed contract to the patched one. Compared with previous work, our approach can protect smart contracts and DeFi in a distributed manner, avoiding reliance on privileged users or trusted third parties. Our experiment results show that SolSaviour can protect smart contracts and complex DeFi protocols with feasible overhead.
KW - Blockchain
KW - decentralized finance (DeFi)
KW - DeFi security
KW - smart contract
KW - trusted execution environment (TEE)
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85146238565&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TPDS.2022.3232548
DO - 10.1109/TPDS.2022.3232548
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85146238565
SN - 1045-9219
VL - 34
SP - 828
EP - 842
JO - IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
JF - IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
IS - 3
ER -