A large-scale exploratory study on the proxy pattern in Ethereum

2024-06-04

Empirical Software Engineering

AI Summary

This study systematically investigates the deployment landscape, upgrade practices, and security risks of proxy patterns in Ethereum. To address the lack of large-scale empirical analysis, we propose a multidimensional methodology integrating static analysis, dynamic call-graph reconstruction, on-chain transaction tracing, and cluster-based statistical analysis. Applying this approach to over one million smart contracts, we conduct the first comprehensive, network-wide proxy pattern census. Our findings reveal that 37.2% of upgradeable contracts exhibit high-risk proxy configurations, and we identify 127 real-world exploited proxy vulnerabilities. We further characterize three novel risk categories: proxy misuse, logic flaws, and governance failures. As a key contribution, we release ProxyBench—the first open-source benchmark dataset of proxy contracts—designed to support security assessment, formal verification, and tool evaluation for upgradeable smart contracts.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Cryptocurrency and smart contracts
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Problem

• Ethereum Blockchain
• Proxy Patterns
• DApp Development

Innovation

• Ethereum
• Proxy Patterns
• ERC-1167