EthIR: A Framework for High-Level Analysis of Ethereum Bytecode

TL;DR

EthIR is a framework designed to analyze Ethereum bytecode directly, enabling property inference when source code is unavailable or when bytecode-level details are crucial, such as gas consumption and compiler optimizations.

Contribution

The paper introduces EthIR, a novel framework that extends CFG analysis to produce a high-level representation of Ethereum bytecode for advanced analysis.

Findings

Enables analysis of bytecode without source code

Supports inference of gas consumption and optimizations

Builds on CFGs to produce rule-based representations

Abstract

Analyzing Ethereum bytecode, rather than the source code from which it was generated, is a necessity when: (1) the source code is not available (e.g., the blockchain only stores the bytecode), (2) the information to be gathered in the analysis is only visible at the level of bytecode (e.g., gas consumption is specified at the level of EVM instructions), (3) the analysis results may be affected by optimizations performed by the compiler (thus the analysis should be done ideally after compilation). This paper presents EthIR, a framework for analyzing Ethereum bytecode, which relies on (an extension of) OYENTE, a tool that generates CFGs; EthIR produces from the CFGs, a rule-based representation (RBR) of the bytecode that enables the application of (existing) high-level analyses to infer properties of EVM code.