PhD Dissertation Proposal by NGUYEN Duy Tai | Towards Securing Smart Contracts Automatically

Smart contracts are distributed, self-enforcing programs executing on top of blockchain networks. They have the potential to revolutionize many industries such as financial institutes and supply chains. As smart contracts gain more popularity and carry more valuable digital assets, they become more of an interesting target for attackers. It is essential that smart contracts are systematically analyzed or even verified, ideally before they are deployed. However, smart contract languages such as Solidity are Turing-complete, which implies that verifying them statically is infeasible.

In this dissertation, we develop multiple alternative approaches towards securing smart contracts automatically. First, we propose an adaptive fuzzer for Solidity smart contracts. The fuzzer employs a lightweight objective function targeting those hard-to-cover branches. Second, we propose an approach to repair smart contracts so that they are proved to be free of 4 kinds of common vulnerabilities. Last, we are developing a verification framework to support or refute smart contract’s safety properties.

NGUYEN Duy Tai is a PhD student in School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University. He is supervised by Professor SUN Jun. His research work focuses on developing tools and theories for smart contract security.