Cross-Chain bridges have become the most popular solution to support asset interoperability between heterogeneous blockchains. However, while providing efficient and flexible cross-chain asset transfer, the complex workflow involving both on-chain smart contracts and off-chain programs causes emerging security issues. In the past year, there have been more than ten severe attacks against cross-chain bridges, causing billions of loss. With few studies focusing on the security of cross-chain bridges, the community still lacks the knowledge and tools to mitigate this significant threat. To bridge the gap, we conduct the first study on the security of cross-chain bridges. We document three new classes of security bugs and propose a set of security properties and patterns to characterize them. Based on those patterns, we design Xscope, an automatic tool to find security violations in cross-chain bridges and detect real-world attacks. We evaluate Xscope on four popular cross-chain bridges. It successfully detects all known attacks and finds suspicious attacks unreported before. A video of Xscope is available at https://youtu.be/vMRO_qOqtXY.
@article{arxiv.2208.07119,
title = {Xscope: Hunting for Cross-Chain Bridge Attacks},
author = {Jiashuo Zhang and Jianbo Gao and Yue Li and Ziming Chen and Zhi Guan and Zhong Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.07119},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
To appear at the Tool Demonstration Track of ASE'22. Please cite the conference version