SCUR: Smart Contracts with a Static Upper-Bound on Resource Usage
Markus Knecht, Burkhard Stiller · 2020
Transactions (TX) sent and executed by a public Blockchain (BC) need to pay a TX fee. The fee is relative to the resources consumed when including the TX into a block. The sender of the TX pays for the fee in the native currency of the BC used. Such a fee protects the network from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks and provides incentives for TXs inclusion. BCs that support Smart Contracts (SC), thus, TXs can execute user-provided code, require a mechanism for fee calculation depending on the resources consumed by the code executed. Ethereum uses an elaborated mechanism compared to Bitcoin, leading to an increase in the attack surface of their SCs. The mechanism that makes the Bitcoin script - a limited version of SCs - more secure is the ability to compute, independent of the BC's state, an upperbound on resources needed to execute this TX. Thus, this work proposes a new approach enabling security benefits by defining an upper-bound on resource usage for general SCs. Furthermore, the approach allows for the payment of fees in any currency and not just the native currency of the BC.