Automated Auditing of Price Gouging TOD Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts

With the emergence of decentralized finance, smart contracts and their users become more and more susceptible to expensive exploitations. This paper investigates the price gouging transaction order dependency vulnerabilities in smart contracts. A static analysis based approach is proposed to automatically locate and rectify such vulnerabilities, and a prototype tool using Slither, a static analyzer for Solidity, is also developed. All in all, empirical results on a benchmark suite containing 51 Solidity smart contracts show that the proposed methodology can be used successfully to both detect such vulnerabilities and rectify them, or to certify that a Solidity smart contract under question does not contain such vulnerabilities.