Characterizing Ethereum Upgradable Smart Contracts and Their Security Implications

arXiv:2403.01290v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Upgradeable smart contracts (USCs) have been widely adopted to enable modifying deployed smart contracts. While USCs bring great flexibility to developers, improper usage might introduce new security issues, potentially allowing attackers to hijack USCs and their users. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale measurement study to characterize USCs and their security implications in the wild. We summarize six commonly used USC patterns and develop a tool, USCDetector, to identify USCs without needing source code. …

arxiv attackers contracts cs.ce cs.cr developers enable ethereum flexibility great hijack large measurement scale security security issues smart smart contracts study