  The cryptocurrency Ethereum is the most widely used execution platform for
smart contracts. Smart contracts are distributed applications, which govern
financial assets and, hence, can implement advanced financial instruments, such
as decentralized exchanges or autonomous organizations (DAOs). Their financial
nature makes smart contracts an attractive attack target, as demonstrated by
numerous exploits on popular contracts resulting in financial damage of
millions of dollars. This omnipresent attack hazard motivates the need for
sound static analysis tools, which assist smart contract developers in
eliminating contract vulnerabilities a priori to deployment. Vulnerability
assessment that is sound and insightful for EVM contracts is a formidable
challenge because contracts execute low-level bytecode in a largely unknown and
potentially hostile execution environment. So far, there exists no provably
sound automated analyzer that allows for the verification of security
properties based on program dependencies, even though prevalent attack classes
fall into this category. In this work, we present HoRStify, the first automated
analyzer for dependency properties of Ethereum smart contracts based on sound
static analysis. HoRStify grounds its soundness proof on a formal proof
framework for static program slicing that we instantiate to the semantics of
EVM bytecode. We demonstrate that HoRStify is flexible enough to soundly verify
the absence of famous attack classes such as timestamp dependency and, at the
same time, performant enough to analyze real-world smart contracts.

Cryptography and Security