OpenTracer: A Dynamic Transaction Trace Analyzer for Smart Contract Invariant Generation and Beyond

TL;DR

OpenTracer is an open-source tool that provides comprehensive dynamic analysis of Ethereum transactions, enabling invariant generation and detailed transaction tracking for smart contracts, thus filling a significant gap in existing analysis tools.

Contribution

It introduces OpenTracer, the first open-source tool capable of complete transaction tracking and invariant inference from smart contract transaction histories.

Findings

Analyzed 350,800 Ethereum transactions.

Successfully inferred 23 types of invariants.

Provides a resource for further research and development.

Abstract

Smart contracts, self-executing programs on the blockchain, facilitate reliable value exchanges without centralized oversight. Despite the recent focus on dynamic analysis of their transaction histories in both industry and academia, no open-source tool currently offers comprehensive tracking of complete transaction information to extract user-desired data such as invariant-related data. This paper introduces OpenTracer, designed to address this gap. OpenTracer guarantees comprehensive tracking of every execution step, providing complete transaction information. OpenTracer has been employed to analyze 350,800 Ethereum transactions, successfully inferring 23 different types of invariant from predefined templates. The tool is fully open-sourced, serving as a valuable resource for developers and researchers aiming to study transaction behaviors or extract and validate new invariants from transaction traces. The source code of OpenTracer is available at https://github.com/jeffchen006/OpenTracer.