Ethereum Contract Honeypot Risk Analysis

In recent years, smart contracts on the Ethereum platform have attracted considerable attention, and smart contracts have increasingly become targets of cyberattacks for the purpose of stealing cryptoassets. One of the emerging attack methods is to intentionally deploy contracts that appear to contain vulnerabilities but have backdoors, and that, lure attackers who are targeting vulnerable contracts to steal cryptoassets. These are called smart contract honeypots (henceforth referred to simply as “contract honeypots”). Torres et al. analyzed contract honeypots for the first time at USNIX Security 2019. In this study, we look at eight types of contract honeypots organized by Torres et al. and calculate the damages caused by each of them. We also analyze the code of contract honeypots by focusing on the arguments of the money transfer process, and we discovered a new type of contract honeypot. This analysis suggests that smart contracts with “this.balance” in the money transfer process may be contract honeypots. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of contract honeypots on general users.