Search: “smart contracts”

On Identifying Sound Conditions for Frontrunning Resistance

Researchers formally define smart-contract frontrunning resistance, showing 55% of 393 audited vulnerabilities escape state-of-the-art detection, and find two undisclosed Ethereum flaws.

The paper gives the first formal definition of frontrunning vulnerability for smart contracts, grounded in how honest users interact with contracts rather than contract code alone. In a large-scale study of 287 smart contract audits, 55% of the 393 vulnerabilities reported by leading auditors fall outside the scope of state-of-the-art dynamic detection criteria. The authors present a sound algorithm for synthesizing secure interaction conditions and apply it to real-world contracts, uncovering previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in two Ethereum contracts.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 13:35 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Detecting Logic Vulnerabilities Across the Contract and Device Layers of Blockchain-Enabled IoT With Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Graph Attention

MA-HGAT framework detects logic vulnerabilities across smart contract and IoT device firmware layers using multi-agent heterogeneous graph attention.

Researchers extend MA-HGAT into a cross-layer multi-agent heterogeneous graph attention framework that models smart contracts, firmware artifacts, device fleets, and transaction streams for blockchain-enabled IoT security. A four-role, nine-relation schema supports graph-, link-, and node-level detection tasks, while a gateway-cloud partition enables lightweight edge inference on resource-constrained devices.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 16, 09:08 UTC · 19h agoResearch

TasmScan: Continuation-Aware Taint Analysis for TVM Bytecode with Savelist Abstraction

TasmScan introduces source-free taint analysis for TON smart-contract bytecode, detecting 95.3% of defects with 96.8% precision and 17x speedup.

TasmScan is the first bytecode-level static analysis framework for the TON Virtual Machine, enabling cross-continuation data flow reasoning without source code by modeling savelist semantics through forward register analysis with formal over-approximation guarantees. It lifts bytecode into a typed intermediate representation (TASIR) and performs path-sensitive taint analysis. On a 208-contract benchmark with human-confirmed ground truth it detects 95.3% of defects across five classes at 96.8% precision, and resolves 294,546 dynamic continuation targets with 100% precision across 2,921 registry contracts. It achieves a 17x median speedup over symbolic-execution baselines.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 11:01 UTC · 1d agoResearch1

IntentFuzz: A Protocol-Aware Fuzzer for Automated Invariant Violation Detection in Intent-Based Cross-Chain Bridges

IntentFuzz protocol-aware fuzzer recovers bridge structure from unannotated Solidity and confirmed 22 invariant violations across 24 real-world deployments.

IntentFuzz formalizes a taxonomy separating invariant violations from settlement exposures in intent-based cross-chain bridges, then recovers a bridge's intent structure and deposit/fill function roles from unannotated Solidity source. It classified deposit and fill functions with 100% recall and 82% combined precision, and achieved 100% recall and precision on 23 planted-bug mutants. Across 24 real-world deployments it confirmed 17 genuine invariant violations with heuristic-only input generation, rising to 22 with its LLM-assisted tier, spanning eight vulnerable GitHub repositories with findings reproducible against public deployed bytecode.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 16:03 UTC · 5d agoResearch1

Function Name Is All You Need to Detect Blockchain Application Attacks

TxLucent detects blockchain dApp attacks from transaction function-name sequences using a transformer, achieving 1.56% false negatives without source code.

Researchers propose TxLucent, which maps transaction call traces to function name sequences and uses a transformer to detect blockchain application attacks without source code or handcrafted rules. Evaluated on 424 real-world incidents with 14,611 attack transactions, it achieves a 1.56% false negative rate and an estimated 0.0017% false positive rate across over 500 million Ethereum transactions. Average analysis time of 24.90 milliseconds supports real-time detection on popular blockchains.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 00:43 UTC · 6d agoResearch1

New physical attacks are quickly diluting secure enclave defenses from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel

Ars Technica · Security·Oct 29, 13:40 UTC · Oct 29, 2025Research

The Story of Colossus

Schneier on Security·May 6, 11:11 UTC · May 6, 2021Research1

Use a smartwatch to verify handwritten signatures and detect forgeries? Sure!

Help Net Security·Jan 31, 07:00 UTC · Jan 31, 2020Research

The Role of US Technology in China's Public Security System

Recorded Future·Jul 15, 00:00 UTC · Jul 15, 2025Research

Risky Bulletin: Expired cards can be used for new transactions

Researchers show expired Visa contactless cards can be revived via NFC man-in-the-middle relay to run fraudulent transactions; roundup also covers major breaches.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built an NFC man-in-the-middle rig that updates a card's expiration date in transit and relays the modified payment to POS terminals, reviving expired contactless cards; Visa terminals and the backends of all five banks studied failed to catch the manipulation. The same roundup reports Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, Lazarus breached South Korea's Presidential Office as part of a campaign exceeding 100 victims, and French telecom SFR suffered a breach affecting over 2.1 million customers.

Risky Business News·Aug 24, 04:40 UTC · 24d agoResearch1