Modelling and Enforcing Access Control Requirements for Smart Contracts
| Vortragende(r) | Jan-Philipp Töberg | |
|---|---|---|
| Vortragstyp | Masterarbeit | |
| Betreuer(in) | Frederik Reiche | |
| Termin | Fr 21. Januar 2022 | |
| Vortragssprache | ||
| Vortragsmodus | ||
| Kurzfassung | Smart contracts are software systems employing the underlying blockchain technology to handle transactions in a decentralized and immutable manner. Due to the immutability of the blockchain, smart contracts cannot be upgraded after their initial deploy. Therefore, reasoning about a contract’s security aspects needs to happen before the deployment. One common vulnerability for smart contracts is improper access control, which enables entities to modify data or employ functionality they are prohibited from accessing. Due to the nature of the blockchain, access to data, represented through state variables, can only be achieved by employing the contract’s functions. To correctly restrict access on the source code level, we improve the approach by Reiche et al. who enforce access control policies based on a model on the architectural level.
This work aims at correctly enforcing role-based access control (RBAC) policies for Solidity smart contract systems on the architectural and source code level. We extend the standard RBAC model by Sandhu, Ferraiolo, and Kuhn to also incorporate insecure information flows and authorization constraints for roles. We create a metamodel to capture the concepts necessary to describe and enforce RBAC policies on the architectural level. The policies are enforced in the source code by translating the model elements to formal specifications. For this purpose, an automatic code generator is implemented. To reason about the implemented smart contracts on the source code level, tools like solc-verify and Slither are employed and extended. Furthermore, we outline the development process resulting from the presented approach. To evaluate our approach and uncover problems and limitations, we employ a case study using the three smart contract software systems Augur, Fizzy and Palinodia. Additionally, we apply a metamodel coverage analysis to reason about the metamodel’s and the generator’s completeness. Furthermore, we provide an argumentation concerning the approach’s correct enforcement. This evaluation shows how a correct enforcement can be achieved under certain assumptions and when information flows are not considered. The presented approach can detect 100% of manually introduced violations during the case study to the underlying RBAC policies. Additionally, the metamodel is expressive enough to describe RBAC policies and contains no unnecessary elements, since approximately 90% of the created metamodel are covered by the implemented generator. We identify and describe limitations like oracles or public variables. | |