Precise Static Identification of Ethereum Storage Variables

Smart contracts are small programs that run autonomously on the blockchain, using it as their persistent memory. The predominant platform for smart contracts is the Ethereum VM (EVM). In EVM smart contracts, a problem with significant applications is to identify data structures (in blockchain state, a.k.a. "storage"), given only the deployed smart contract code. The problem has been highly challenging and has often been considered nearly impossible to address satisfactorily. (For reference, the latest state-of-the-art research tool fails to recover nearly all complex data structures and scales to 50% of contracts.) Much of the complication is that the main on-chain data structures (mappings and arrays) have their locations derived dynamically through code execution.

We propose sophisticated static analysis techniques to solve the identification of on-chain data structures with extremely high fidelity and completeness. Our analysis scales nearly universally and recovers deep data structures. Our techniques are able to identify the exact types of data structures with 95.70% precision and at least 94.96% recall, compared to a state-of-the-art tool managing 83.30% and 55.65% respectively. Strikingly, the analysis is often more complete than the storage description that the compiler itself produces, with full access to the source code.

• Theory of computation → Program analysis; • Security and privacy → Software reverse engineering; • Software and its engineering → Automated static analysis.