Demystifying Exploitable Bugs in Smart Contracts

Abstract

Exploitable bugs in smart contracts have caused significant monetary loss. Despite the substantial advances in smart contract bug finding, exploitable bugs and real-world attacks are still trending. In this paper we systematically investigate 516 unique real-world smart contract vulnerabilities in years 2021–2022, and study how many can be exploited by malicious users and cannot be detected by existing analysis tools. We further categorize the bugs that cannot be detected by existing tools into seven types and study their root causes, distributions, difficulties to audit, consequences, and repair strategies. For each type, we abstract them to a bug model (if possible), facilitating finding similar bugs in other contracts and future automation. We leverage the findings in auditing real world smart contracts, and so far we have been rewarded with $102,660 bug bounties for identifying 15 critical zero-day exploitable bugs, which could have caused up to $22.52 millions monetary loss if exploited.