While catastrophic attacks on Ethereum persist, vulnerability research remains fixated on implementation-level smart contract bugs, creating a gap between academic understanding of vulnerabilities and the root causes of high-impact, real-world incidents. To address this, we employ a two-pronged methodology: first, a systematic literature review of 71 academic papers to build a catalog of 24 active and 5 deprecated vulnerabilities. Second, we conduct an in-depth, empirical analysis of 50 of the most severe real-world attacks between 2022 and 2025, collectively incurring over $1.09B in losses, to identify their root causes. We introduce the concept of "exploit chains" by revealing that many incidents are not caused by isolated vulnerabilities but by combinations of human, operational, and economic design flaws that link with implementation bugs to enable an attack. Our analysis yields insights on how decentralized applications are exploited in practice, leading to a novel, four-tier root-cause framework that moves beyond code-level vulnerabilities. We find that real-world successful attacks on Ethereum (and related networks) trace back to one of the four tiers of (1) protocol logic design, (2) lifecycle and governance, (3) external dependencies, and (4) classic smart contract vulnerabilities. We investigate the suitability of this multi-tier incident root-cause framework via a case study.
Cryptocurrency is a novel exploration of a form of currency that proposes a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on blockchain technology and cryptographic theory. While cryptocurrency has the security characteristics of being distributed and tamper-proof, increasing market demand has led to a rise in malicious transactions and attacks, thereby exposing cryptocurrency to vulnerabilities, privacy issues, and security threats. Particularly concerning are the emerging types of attacks and threats, which have made securing cryptocurrency increasingly urgent. Therefore, this paper classifi…
Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) play a critical role in the industrial control systems. Vulnerabilities in PLC programs might lead to attacks causing devastating consequences to the critical infrastructure, as shown in Stuxnet and similar attacks. In recent years, we have seen an exponential increase in vulnerabilities reported for PLC control logic. Looking back on past research, we found extensive studies explored control logic modification attacks, as well as formal verification-based security solutions. We performed systematization on these studies, and found attacks that can comprom…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) in Ethereum is a financial ecosystem built on the blockchain that has locked over 200 billion USD until April 2022. All transaction information is transparent and open when transacting through the DeFi protocol, which has led to a series of attacks. Several studies have attempted to optimize it from both economic and technical perspectives. However, few works analyze the vulnerabilities and optimizations of the entire DeFi system. In this paper, we first systematically analyze vulnerabilities related to DeFi in Ethereum at several levels, then we investigate real-w…
Zero-day vulnerabilities can be accidentally or maliciously placed in code and can remain in place for years. In this study, we address an aspect of their longevity by considering the likelihood that they will be discovered in the code across versions. We approximate well-disguised vulnerabilities as only being discoverable if the relevant lines of code are explicitly examined, and obvious vulnerabilities as being discoverable if any part of the relevant file is examined. We analyze the version-to-version changes in three types of open source software (Mozilla Firefox, GNU/Linus, and glibc) to…
SoK: The Security-Safety Continuum of Multimodal Foundation Models through Information Flow and Global Game-Theoretic Analysis of Asymmetric Threats
CSIRO’s Data61（CSIRO数据61）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Adelaide University（阿德莱德大学）；Responsible AI Research (RAIR) Centre, Adelaide University（阿德莱德大学负责任人工智能研究（RAIR）中心）
SoK: The Last Line of Defense: On Backdoor Defense Evaluation
University of Bergen（卑尔根大学）；Radboud University（拉德博德大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University of Pavia（帕维亚大学）；Ikerlan Research Center Radboud University（Ikerlan研究中心拉德博德大学）
Ethereum holds multiple billions of U.S. dollars in the form of Ether cryptocurrency and ERC-20 tokens, with millions of deployed smart contracts algorithmically operating these funds. Unsurprisingly, the security of Ethereum smart contracts has been under rigorous scrutiny. In recent years, numerous defense tools have been developed to detect different types of smart contract code vulnerabilities. When opportunities for exploiting code vulnerabilities diminish, the attackers start resorting to social engineering attacks, which aim to influence humans -- often the weakest link in the system. T…
With the increase of the adoption of blockchain technology in providing decentralized solutions to various problems, smart contracts have become more popular to the point that billions of US Dollars are currently exchanged every day through such technology. Meanwhile, various vulnerabilities in smart contracts have been exploited by attackers to steal cryptocurrencies worth millions of dollars. The automatic detection of smart contract vulnerabilities therefore is an essential research problem. Existing solutions to this problem particularly rely on human experts to define features or differen…
Smart contracts---stateful executable objects hosted on blockchains like Ethereum---carry billions of dollars worth of coins and cannot be updated once deployed. We present a new systematic characterization of a class of trace vulnerabilities, which result from analyzing multiple invocations of a contract over its lifetime. We focus attention on three example properties of such trace vulnerabilities: finding contracts that either lock funds indefinitely, leak them carelessly to arbitrary users, or can be killed by anyone. We implemented MAIAN, the first tool for precisely specifying and reason…
In today's world, Web applications play a very important role in individual life as well as in any country's development. Web applications have gone through a very rapid growth in the recent years and their adoption is moving faster than that was expected few years ago. Now-a-days, billions of transactions are done online with the aid of different Web applications. Though these applications are used by hundreds of people, in many cases the security level is weak, which makes them vulnerable to get compromised. In most of the scenarios, a user has to be identified before any communication is es…
Knowdit: Agentic Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection with Auditing Knowledge Summarization
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；National Superior College for Engineers, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学高等工程学院）；Bitslab；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Internet of Things (IoT) networks consist of sensors, actuators, mobile and wearable devices that can connect to the Internet. With billions of such devices already in the market which have significant vulnerabilities, there is a dangerous threat to the Internet services and also some cyber-physical systems that are also connected to the Internet. Specifically, due to their existing vulnerabilities IoT devices are susceptible to being compromised and being part of a new type of stealthy Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, called Mongolian DDoS, which is characterized by its widely dis…
The age of the Internet of Things is adding an increasing number of new devices to the Internet and is expected to have fifty billion connected units by 2021. These form an extensive network that may have multiple points where there is a risk of attacks that can compromise the entire system. This paper has conducted a systematic review of security in LoRaWAN protocol specification versions 1.0 and 1.1 by locating its vulnerabilities and determining what measures can be taken for improvement and how they can be checked or tested. The review identifies nineteen areas of vulnerability in the LoRa…
