{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/demystifying-and-detecting-cryptographic","title":"Demystifying and Detecting Cryptographic Defects in Ethereum Smart Contracts","arxiv_id":"2408.04939","date":"2024-08-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jiashuo Zhang","Yiming Shen","Jiachi Chen","Jianzhong Su","Yanlin Wang","Ting Chen","Jianbo Gao","Zhong Chen"],"abstract":"Ethereum has officially provided a set of system-level cryptographic APIs to enhance smart contracts with cryptographic capabilities. These APIs have been utilized in over 10% of Ethereum transactions, motivating developers to implement various on-chain cryptographic tasks, such as digital signatures. However, since developers may not always be cryptographic experts, their ad-hoc and potentially defective implementations could compromise the theoretical guarantees of cryptography, leading to real-world security issues. To mitigate this threat, we conducted the first study aimed at demystifying and detecting cryptographic defects in smart contracts. Through the analysis of 2,406 real-world security reports, we defined nine types of cryptographic defects in smart contracts with detailed descriptions and practical detection patterns. Based on this categorization, we proposed CrySol, a fuzzing-based tool to automate the detection of cryptographic defects in smart contracts. It combines transaction replaying and dynamic taint analysis to extract fine-grained crypto-related semantics and employs crypto-specific strategies to guide the test case generation process. Furthermore, we collected a large-scale dataset containing 25,745 real-world crypto-related smart contracts and evaluated CrySol's effectiveness on it. The result demonstrated that CrySol achieves an overall precision of 95.4% and a recall of 91.2%. Notably, CrySol revealed that 5,847 (22.7%) out of 25,745 smart contracts contain at least one cryptographic defect, highlighting the prevalence of these defects.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04939v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.04939v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"demystifying-and-detecting-cryptographic","repo_url":"https://github.com/jiashuo-zhang/crysol","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}