Notable Works in Auditing and Security

Auditing and Security
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SCRF is crowd-sourcing a list of key readings in each forum category to point readers to notable works and foundational research. Please comment in this thread with links to seminal research that could form part of an introductory graduate seminar in this category.

Please format your additions using the template below:

## [Category Name]

### [Full Paper Title]

- **Source:** <[Link]>
- **Authors:** [Author 1, Author 2, etc.]
- **Description:** [One sentence description of the work]
- **Relevance:** [Once sentence explaining the special relevance of this work]
- **Citation:** [Citation and abstract in plaintext]
- **Tags:** [Relevant forum tags, if any]

As with every post in SCRF, a discussion is highly encouraged, please be prepared to explain why your link should be added to the canonical list.

We are also offering a bounty for all successful additions.

Notable Works in Auditing and Security

The Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains: Towards a Standardized Model for Studying Vulnerabilities, Threats, and Defenses

  • Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09775
  • Authors: Ivan Homoliak, Sarad Venugopalan, Daniël Reijsbergen, Qingze Hum, Richard Schumi, Pawel Szalachowski
  • Description: This paper proposes a 4-layer security reference architecture for blockchains and identifies known threats, countermeasures, and dependencies at each layer
  • Relevance: This paper is relevant because it is one of the first contributing towards the standardization of security threat analysis in the blockchain space
  • Citation: I. Homoliak, S. Venugopalan, D. Reijsbergen, Q. Hum, R. Schumi and P. Szalachowski, “The Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains: Toward a Standardized Model for Studying Vulnerabilities, Threats, and Defenses,” in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 341-390, Firstquarter 2021, doi: 10.1109/COMST.2020.3033665.

A Survey on Ethereum Systems Security: Vulnerabilities, Attacks, and Defenses

  • Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04507
  • Authors: Huashan Chen, Marcus Pendleton, Laurent Njilla, Shouhuai Xu
  • Description: This paper provides a holistic survey of Ethereum security, stratifying vulnerabilities, attacks, and defenses
  • Relevance: This paper is relevant because it is one of the first to investigate the security issues across different layers of the Ethereum architecture

A Survey on the Security of Blockchain Systems

  • Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06993
  • Authors: Xiaoqi Li, Peng Jiang, Ting Chen, Xiapu Luo, Qiaoyan Wen
  • Description: This paper performs a high-level review of blockchain security as a whole.
  • Relevance: This paper is relevant because it covers attacks in a wide time range (2009 to 2017)

246 Findings From our Smart Contract Audits: An Executive Summary

Ethereum Smart Contract Security Best Practices

  • Source: https://consensys.github.io/smart-contract-best-practices/
  • Authors: Consensys
  • Description: This post provides key security considerations when developing Ethereum smart contracts
  • Relevance: This post is relevant because it is a state-of-the-art catalog, providing a reference point for educating developers and auditors

List of Ethereum Smart Contracts Post-Mortems

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I’m might be missing some context here. Can you please help me understand what this discussion should be about?

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this is not a “discussion” post. this is a post to accumulate research in the area for people to contribute to.

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This article is in Communications of the ACM. It’s discusses issues surrounding responsible vulnerability disclosure and best practices in cryptocurrencies

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Thanks @socrates1024 We will take a look and will consider its inclusion. In the meantime, feel free to provide a summary of the paper so others can better familiarize themselves with the work and discuss it further.

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I came across with this paper which I think is worth reading:
TEETHER: Gnawing at Ethereum to Automatically Exploit Smart Contracts

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@tina1998612 That is awesome, thanks for pointing out this paper. Out of curiosity, do you know how much does the authors’ tool differ from other tools that do symbolic execution (e.g., mythril), and what is its false-positive rate?

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I think this might be useful to some researchers as well. It’s slightly out of date but already is one of the most comprehensive lists I’ve seen. Contributions are welcomed though :)

The Blockchain Security Database is an open-source database created by ConsenSys Diligence to act as a repository of security information organized by projects. The database contains a catalog of blockchain projects with details pertaining to their security including audits, bounties, and security contacts.

https://consensys.github.io/blockchainSecurityDB/

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Should we add a paper a bit more generic about how communities outside cryptocurrencies approach Audits? Something like an SOK or a comprehensive study of the audits in practice.

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We have discussed this, and we think it is more important to focus on the crypto and blockchain space in order to not get too weighed down by the effectively unlimited variations on audit types.

Everyone is not subject to Sarbanes-Oxley or GDPR audit expectations, so the potential avenues that could detract from the focus of the forum are near unlimited. In that aspect, it is more effective to focus on this space for now. That might be something we can do in the future when the forum has more content from which to draw comparisons.

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Hi! Collected al researches that I was able to find here:

In Security and Tools sections

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Here’s similar topic on zhihu.
Maybe helpful.

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@Larry_Bates I hope you find this helpful because it serves more as a welcome addition to your article.

The security measures of a company are systematically examined by an auditor using predetermined criteria during an audit.
The auditor searches for proof that a specific policy or practice is being followed as part of a security audit.

Finding out how well a company’s information security measures are performing is the main objective of a security audit.
The evaluation of a company’s ability to safeguard its data assets and to effectively distribute that data to the right people is unique to IT audits.

To keep your company operating at peak efficiency, you should perform the following four types of security audits on a regular basis:

• Risk analysis.
Risk assessments support organizations in identifying, quantifying, and prioritizing risk.
• Evaluation of Vulnerabilities.
• Penetration tests,
• compliance audits, and more.

HOW TO DO THIS WITH BLOCKCHAIN;
Blockchain auditing is the laborious process of tracking transactions from wallet to wallet while looking up each transaction along the way on the blockchain.
Data structures created by blockchain technology have built-in security features. It is founded on cryptographic, decentralized, and consensus principles that uphold the integrity of transactions. The data is organized into blocks in the majority of blockchains or distributed ledger technologies (DLT), and each block contains a transaction or collection of transactions.

The only way to close these security gaps and cut down on vulnerabilities is to regularly perform a blockchain security audit. Since blockchain applications are different from those operating on a centralized system, you won’t be able to halt operations as a problem develops.

The procedure demands patience, focus, and blockchain expertise.

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