One Signature, Multiple Payments: Demystifying and Detecting Signature Replay Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts

TL;DR

This paper investigates signature replay vulnerabilities in smart contracts, analyzing their causes and characteristics, and proposes LASiR, an LLM-assisted static analysis tool, to automatically detect these vulnerabilities with high accuracy across multiple blockchains.

Contribution

It is the first empirical study on SRVs in smart contracts and introduces LASiR, combining semantic understanding from LLMs with static taint analysis and symbolic execution for effective detection.

Findings

SRVs are prevalent, affecting contracts with significant assets.

LASiR achieves an F1-score of 87.90% in detection accuracy.

Approximately 19.63% of signature-using contracts on Ethereum contain SRVs.

Abstract

Smart contracts have significantly advanced blockchain technology, and digital signatures are crucial for reliable verification of contract authority. Through signature verification, smart contracts can ensure that signers possess the required permissions, thus enhancing security and scalability. However, lacking checks on signature usage conditions can lead to repeated verifications, increasing the risk of permission abuse and threatening contract assets. We define this issue as the Signature Replay Vulnerability (SRV). In this paper, we conducted the first empirical study to investigate the causes and characteristics of the SRVs. From 1,419 audit reports across 37 blockchain security companies, we identified 108 with detailed SRV descriptions and classified five types of SRVs. To detect these vulnerabilities automatically, we designed LASiR, which utilizes the general semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist in the static taint analysis of the signature state and identify the signature reuse behavior. It also employs path reachability verification via symbolic execution to ensure effective and reliable detection. To evaluate the performance of LASiR, we conducted large-scale experiments on 15,383 contracts involving signature verification, selected from the initial dataset of 918,964 contracts across four blockchains: Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, and Arbitrum. The results indicate that SRVs are widespread, with affected contracts holding $4.76 million in active assets. Among these, 19.63% of contracts that use signatures on Ethereum contain SRVs. Furthermore, manual verification demonstrates that LASiR achieves an F1-score of 87.90% for detection. Ablation studies and comparative experiments reveal that the semantic information provided by LLMs aids static taint analysis, significantly enhancing LASiR's detection performance.