Session 11A: Blockchain Security 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Giulia Scaffino (TU Wien), Lukas Aumayr (TU Wien), Mahsa Bastankhah (Princeton University), Zeta Avarikioti (TU Wien), Matteo Maffei (TU Wien)

PAPER
Alba: The Dawn of Scalable Bridges for Blockchains

Over the past decade, cryptocurrencies have garnered attention from academia and industry alike, fostering a diverse blockchain ecosystem and novel applications. The inception of bridges improved interoperability, enabling asset transfers across different blockchains to capitalize on their unique features. Despite their surge in popularity and the emergence of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), trustless bridge protocols remain inefficient, either relaying too much information (e.g., light-client-based bridges) or demanding expensive computation (e.g., zk-based bridges). These inefficiencies arise because existing bridges securely prove a transaction's on-chain inclusion on another blockchain. Yet this is unnecessary as off-chain solutions, like payment and state channels, permit safe transactions without on-chain publication. However, existing bridges do not support the verification of off-chain payments. This paper fills this gap by introducing the concept of Pay2Chain bridges that leverage the advantages of off-chain solutions like payment channels to overcome current bridges' limitations. Our proposed Pay2Chain bridge, named Alba, facilitates the efficient, secure, and trustless execution of conditional payments or smart contracts on a target blockchain based on off-chain events. Alba, besides its technical advantages, enriches the source blockchain's ecosystem by facilitating DeFi applications, multi-asset payment channels, and optimistic stateful off-chain computation. We formalize the security of Alba against Byzantine adversaries in the UC framework and complement it with a game theoretic analysis. We further introduce formal scalability metrics to demonstrate Alba's efficiency. Our empirical evaluation confirms Alba's efficiency in terms of communication complexity and on-chain costs, with its optimistic case incurring only twice the cost of a standard Ethereum transaction of token ownership transfer.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

Permalink

The post NDSS 2025 – Alba: The Dawn Of Scalable Bridges For Blockchains appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Session 11A: Blockchain Security 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Ye Liu (Singapore Management University), Yue Xue (MetaTrust Labs), Daoyuan Wu (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Yuqiang Sun (Nanyang Technological University), Yi Li (Nanyang Technological University), Miaolei Shi (MetaTrust Labs), Yang Liu (Nanyang Technological University)

PAPER
PropertyGPT: LLM-driven Formal Verification of Smart Contracts through Retrieval-Augmented Property Generation

Formal verification is a technique that can prove the correctness of a system with respect to a certain specification or property. It is especially valuable for security-sensitive smart contracts that manage billions in cryptocurrency assets. Although existing research has developed various static verification tools (or provers) for smart contracts, a key missing component is the automated generation of comprehensive properties, including invariants, pre-/post-conditions, and rules. Hence, industry-leading players like Certora have to rely on their own or crowdsourced experts to manually write properties case by case. With recent advances in large language models (LLMs), this paper explores the potential of leveraging state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4, to transfer existing human-written properties (e.g., those from Certora auditing reports) and automatically generate customized properties for unknown code. To this end, we embed existing properties into a vector database and retrieve a reference property for LLM-based in-context learning to generate a new property for a given code. While this basic process is relatively straightforward, ensuring that the generated properties are (i) compilable, (ii) appropriate, and (iii) verifiable presents challenges. To address (i), we use the compilation and static analysis feedback as an external oracle to guide LLMs in iteratively revising the generated properties. For (ii), we consider multiple dimensions of similarity to rank the properties and employ a weighted algorithm to identify the top-K properties as the final result. For (iii), we design a dedicated prover to formally verify the correctness of the generated properties. We have implemented these strategies into a novel LLM-based property generation tool called PropertyGPT. Our experiments show that PropertyGPT can generate comprehensive and high-quality properties, achieving an 80% recall compared to the ground truth. It successfully detected 26 CVEs/attack incidents out of 37 tested and also uncovered 12 zero-day vulnerabilities, leading to $8,256 in bug bounty rewards.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

Permalink

The post NDSS 2025 – PropertyGPT appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Session 11A: Blockchain Security 2

Authors, Creators & Presenters: Qiyang Song (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Heqing Huang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xiaoqi Jia (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Yuanbo Xie (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Jiahao Cao (Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University)

PAPER
Silence False Alarms: Identifying Anti-Reentrancy Patterns on Ethereum to Refine Smart Contract Reentrancy Detection

Reentrancy vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts have caused significant financial losses, prompting the creation of several automated reentrancy detectors. However, these detectors frequently yield a high rate of false positives due to coarse detection rules, often misclassifying contracts protected by anti-reentrancy patterns as vulnerable. Thus, there is a critical need for the development of specialized automated tools to assist these detectors in accurately identifying anti-reentrancy patterns. While existing code analysis techniques show promise for this specific task, they still face significant challenges in recognizing anti-reentrancy patterns. These challenges are primarily due to the complex and varied features of anti-reentrancy patterns, compounded by insufficient prior knowledge about these features. This paper introduces AutoAR, an automated recognition system designed to explore and identify prevalent anti-reentrancy patterns in Ethereum contracts. AutoAR utilizes a specialized graph representation, RentPDG, combined with a data filtration approach, to effectively capture anti-reentrancy-related semantics from a large pool of contracts. Based on RentPDGs extracted from these contracts, AutoAR employs a recognition model that integrates a graph auto-encoder with a clustering technique, specifically tailored for precise anti-reentrancy pattern identification. Experimental results show AutoAR can assist existing detectors in identifying 12 prevalent anti-reentrancy patterns with 89% accuracy, and when integrated into the detection workflow, it significantly reduces false positives by over 85%.

ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.

Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations' YouTube Channel.

Permalink

The post NDSS 2025 – Silence False Alarms appeared first on Security Boulevard.