Selected Aspects of Law Enforcement Investigations into the Modus Operandi of Potential Offenses Involving Ethereum Smart Contracts

Анотація

With the rapid advancement of smart contracts, ensuring their security has become critically important. A key aspect of this security-both for potential users and for law enforcement investigating offenses involving smart contracts (modus operandi)-is the ability to interpret the logic of published contracts and verify the consistency between deployed bytecode and the original source code. The authors' research demonstrates that such verification was successfully achieved only within the Remix integrated development environment (IDE) using the Contract Verification-Etherscan plugin. Upon activation, the plugin verified the consistency of the deployed bytecode with the contract's source code, which was subsequently published on Etherscan and marked as "Contract Source Code Verified (Exact Match)." Similar results were obtained during testing with a smart contract for issuing non-fungible ERC721 tokens (NFTs). The study also identified potential vulnerabilities involving NFTs linked to digital assets stored off-chain at a URI defined during token issuance. These risks can be mitigated by employing an additional smart contract to ensure that NFT transfers include the associated digital asset, with the asset hosted on IPFS. The analysis and testing tools presented herein provide law enforcement with the means to understand the modus operandi of offenses involving smart contracts, thereby aiding in criminal investigations.

Класифікація

Ідентифікатори

Схожі роботи