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SRP: An Efficient Runtime Protection Framework for Blockchain-based Smart Contracts

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submitted on 2024-01-30, 05:00 and posted on 2024-01-30, 05:01 authored by Isra M. Ali, Noureddine Lasla, Mohamed M. Abdallah, Aiman Erbad

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.

Other Information

Published in: Journal of Network and Computer Applications
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jnca.2023.103658

Funding

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

History

Language

  • English

Publisher

Elsevier

Publication Year

  • 2023

License statement

This Item is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Institution affiliated with

  • Hamad Bin Khalifa University
  • College of Science and Engineering - HBKU