SODA: A Generic Online Detection Framework for Smart Contracts

Smart contracts have become lucrative and profitable targets for attackers because they can hold a great amount of money. Unfortunately, existing offline approaches for discovering the vulnerabilities in smart contracts or checking the correctness of smart contracts cannot conduct online detection of attacking transactions. Besides, existing online approaches only focus on specific attacks and cannot be easily extended to detect other attacks. Moreover, developing a new online detection system for smart contracts from scratch is time-consuming and requires deep understanding of blockchain internals, thus making it difficult to quickly implement and deploy mechanisms to detect new attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel generic online detection framework named SODA for smart contracts on any blockchains that support Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). SODA distinguishes itself from existing online approaches through its capability, efficiency, and compatibility. First, SODA empowers users to easily develop apps for detecting various attacks online (i.e., when attacks happen) by separating information collection and attack detection with layered design. At the higher layer, SODA provides unified interfaces to develop detection apps against various attacks. At the lower layer, SODA instruments EVM to collect all primitive information necessary to detect various attacks and constructs 11 kinds of structural information for the ease of developing apps. Based on SODA, users can develop new apps in a few lines of code without modifying EVM. Second, SODA is efficient, because we design on-demand information retrieval to reduce the overhead of information collection and adopt dynamic linking to eliminate the overhead of inter-process communication. Such design allows users to develop detection apps using any programming languages that can generate dynamic link libraries. Third, since more and more blockchains adopt EVM as smart contract runtime, SODA can be easily migrated to such blockchains without modifying apps. Based on SODA, we develop 8 detection apps to detect the attacks exploiting major vulnerabilities in smart contracts, and integrate SODA (including all apps) into 3 popular blockchains: Ethereum, Expanse and Wanchain. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SODA and our detection apps.