Smart contract security
Checking Smart Contracts for Price Manipulation Attacks
A practical way to find out whether someone can trick a smart contract by manipulating a market price.
Problem
Some smart contracts act on prices that an attacker can influence. Even a short-lived price change can make the contract take an unsafe action.
What I built
- I start with a real attack or failure and write down what the attacker changed.
- I turn the contract’s expected behavior into checks for AMM reserves, oracle prices, collateral values, and other price-based decisions.
- I use model checking to replay multi-step attacks and program analysis to find the related code.
What works today
- Example attacks based on AMM and oracle price manipulation.
- A clear link between each attack, the rule it breaks, and the check meant to catch it.
- Failure traces that show what went wrong and where.