Ethereum apps handle financial value, making security crucial. Smart contracts have definitely had their fair share of attacks as a new, experimental technology.
AttacksWe will look at known attacks in this chapter that can be used to exploit vulnerabilities in smart contracts.
Front-running aka transaction-ordering dependenceConcordia University claims that front-running is “a course of action in which a person profits from advance access to privileged market information about potential transactions and trades.” This awareness of future market activities can contribute to manipulation.
For example, realizing that there is going to be a very large inventory of a particular token, a bad actor may buy the token in advance and sell the token for a profit when the excessive purchase order increases the price.
Front-running attacks have been a concern in financial markets for a long time, and the issue is coming up again in cryptocurrency markets because of the open nature of blockchain.
Because the solution to this problem varies by contract, it can be difficult to protect against it. Possible solutions involve batching transactions and using a pre-commit scheme (i.e. allowing users to submit later details).
DoS with block gas limitThe blocks all have a gas cap in the blockchain of the Ethereum. One of the advantages of a block gas cap is that it prevents an infinite transaction loop from being generated by hackers, but if a transaction’s gas usage reaches that limit, the transaction will fail. In a few different ways, this can lead to a DoS attack.
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