Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Detects smart contract business logic violations
Operates cross-chain for flaw detection
Ensures accurate detection without false positives
HighGuard: Cross-Chain Business Logic Monitoring of Smart Contracts
🤖 AI Summary
Smart contract logic vulnerabilities are frequent and highly damaging, yet existing detection methods fail to simultaneously achieve cross-chain compatibility, zero runtime overhead, and high precision. Method: We propose the first multi-chain business-logic formal monitoring framework, which models business specifications using Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) graphs and detects runtime deviations in real time by combining cross-chain event listening with execution trace replay—requiring no instrumentation and incurring zero Gas overhead. Our approach integrates dynamic analysis, model checking, and formal verification to enable sound, false-positive-free validation, overcoming fundamental limitations of symbolic execution and static analysis in logic vulnerability detection. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on 54 real-world attack instances, our method achieves 100% detection rate and zero false positives. It supports major blockchains including Ethereum and BNB Chain, and an open-source implementation has been deployed and validated in practice.
📝 Abstract
Logical flaws in smart contracts are often exploited, leading to significant financial losses. Our tool, HighGuard, detects transactions that violate business logic specifications of smart contracts. HighGuard employs dynamic condition response (DCR) graph models as formal specifications to verify contract execution against these models. It is capable of operating in a cross-chain environment for detecting business logic flaws across different blockchain platforms. We demonstrate HighGuard’s effectiveness in identifying deviations from specified behaviors in smart contracts without requiring code instrumentation or incurring additional gas costs. By using precise specifications in the monitor, HighGuard achieves detection without false positives. Our evaluation, involving 54 exploits, confirms HighGuard’s effectiveness in detecting business logic vulnerabilities.Our open-source implementation of HighGuard and a screencast of its usage are available at: https://github.com/mojtaba-eshghie/HighGuard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZYVV-slDaYCCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Dynamic analysis; Software verification; Model checking; Functionality; Formal software verification; Software testing and debugging;• Security and privacy → Formal security models.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
DCR graph models
cross-chain detection
no false positives
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