Characterizing Erasable Accounts in Ethereum

TL;DR

This paper introduces GLASER, a tool that analyzes Ethereum's database to identify erasable accounts, revealing significant economic losses and aiding in preventing further financial damage.

Contribution

The paper presents the first systematic analysis and a novel tool, GLASER, for detecting erasable accounts in Ethereum, highlighting their impact and attack behaviors.

Findings

Identified 508,482 erasable accounts in Ethereum.

These accounts are associated with over 106 million dollars in potential losses.

GLASER effectively characterizes attack behaviors related to erasable accounts.

Abstract

Being the most popular permissionless blockchain that supports smart contracts, Ethereum allows any user to create accounts on it. However, not all accounts matter. For example, the accounts due to attacks can be removed. In this paper, we conduct the first investigation on erasable accounts that can be removed to save system resources and even users' money (i.e., ETH or gas). In particular, we propose and develop a novel tool named GLASER, which analyzes the State DataBase of Ethereum to discover five kinds of erasable accounts. The experimental results show that GLASER can accurately reveal 508,482 erasable accounts and these accounts lead to users wasting more than 106 million dollars. GLASER can help stop further economic loss caused by these detected accounts. Moreover, GLASER characterizes the attacks/behaviors related to detected erasable accounts through graph analysis.