An Empirical Analysis of EOS Blockchain: Architecture, Contract, and Security

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of the EOS blockchain, examining its architecture, decentralization, performance, smart contract vulnerabilities, and security issues to identify key challenges and areas for improvement.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed multi-dimensional investigation of EOS, highlighting critical security vulnerabilities, performance gaps, and behavioral security threats, thus filling a significant research gap.

Findings

Low account activity and limited supernode participation

Significant gap between actual throughput and claimed performance

Identification of five smart contract vulnerability types

Abstract

With the rapid development of blockchain technology, various blockchain systems are exhibiting vitality and potential. As a representative of Blockchain 3.0, the EOS blockchain has been regarded as a strong competitor to Ethereum. Nevertheless, compared with Bitcoin and Ethereum, academic research and in-depth analyses of EOS remain scarce. To address this gap, this study conducts a comprehensive investigation of the EOS blockchain from five key dimensions: system architecture, decentralization, performance, smart contracts, and behavioral security. The architectural analysis focuses on six core components of the EOS system, detailing their functionalities and operational workflows. The decentralization and performance evaluations, based on data from the XBlock data-sharing platform, reveal several critical issues: low account activity, limited participation in the supernode election process, minimal variation in the set of block producers, and a substantial gap between actual throughput and the claimed million-level performance. Five types of contract vulnerabilities are identified in the smart contract dimension, and four mainstream vulnerability detection platforms are introduced and comparatively analyzed. In terms of behavioral security, four real-world attacks targeting the structural characteristics of EOS are summarized. This study contributes to the ongoing development of the EOS blockchain and provides valuable insights for enhancing the security and regulatory mechanisms of blockchain ecosystems.