Category: Tools

The ConsenSys Diligence team has built a lot of tools with use cases ranging from automatic vulnerability discovery (check out MythX) to network-based vulnerability scanning (TeaTime), to code understanding tools (Surya, VSCode visual developer). Check out all our tools here: Blockchain Security Tools | ConsenSys Diligence A few months ago, we released Scribble, an all-new specification language for smart contracts. Using Scribble, you can extend your smart contract with specifications that we can automatically check using fuzzing and symbolic execution techniques.

Since we released Scribble last December, we have been hard at work adding new features to the language and the tool itself. In this series of posts, we will look at some of the new features we’ve added. Our first post showcases state variable annotations with if_updated. The problem During our early usage of Scribble it became apparent that annotations of functions and contracts are nice, but are sometimes insufficient when reasoning about individual state variables.

Some vendors use an effective sales strategy called “lock-in”. Once you’re in the vendors’ ecosystem, it can be challenging to get out. You’ll have made a big investment into various products that work great together but suck once you use them with anything else. A similar thing can happen (often unintentionally) with tech stacks. You invest big-time in tool X and are then locked into using it because you don’t want to start from scratch with a new tool Y.

Writing Smart Contracts can be fraught with dangers stemming from multiple vectors, but one you may not have considered is Cross Site Scripting attacks initiated by the Smart Contract itself! How is this possible? Let’s explore and solve.

Sometimes unit-tests fail, and you don’t know why. That’s when you want to use fault localisation; to find the fault that’s causing the tests to fail. Tarantula is such an algorithm and finds which lines are most suspect of breaking the tests. I implemented this algorithm and used solidity-coverage results to localise bugs in Ethereum smart contracts. Let’s start at the beginning; the motivation for fault localisation. Imagine you’re just developing a new feature and you run your test suite.

Coming up with properties can be a difficult task! In this previous post we talked about starting to write Scribble properties. Here I’m going to explore four strategies to accelerate annotating your smart contracts! As you might already know, Scribble enables you to write properties that you can then test automatically using methods such as fuzzing and symbolic execution. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? But how do you come up with those properties?

Writing smart contract properties - A new approach to testing Scribble allows you to write smart contract properties that can be automatically tested using fuzzing and symbolic execution techniques. Writing properties requires a bit of a mindset shift. This article will talk about that shift, to go from unit testing to property-based testing with Scribble. If you’re a developer then I’m sure you’re familiar with unit testing, an approach where you write small (unit) test cases to see if a component behaves as expected.

Making sure that smart contracts are secure and bug-free has never been more critical. Unfortunately, it remains a difficult task. While there are helpful tools for automatic testing and formal verification, ensuring the correctness of smart contracts continues to be a time-intensive and challenging task. To make things worse, each tool often has a steep learning curve, and it is often uncertain whether it’s even right for the job.

Announcing the first version of an RPC attack framework for blockchain nodes.

Mythril is an analysis tool which uses symbolic execution to find vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Mythril even generates exploits for the vulnerabilities that it finds 🚀. In a previous article, I wrote about Mythril internals and symbolic execution. In this article, I’ll show how I use Mythril to detect Ownership takeover vulnerabilities. I’ll also use Mythril’s new plugin system install and release plugins with ease! Introduction Out of the box, Mythril comes with several zero-setup detection modules.