Smart wallets on blockchain—attacks and their costs

Abstract

Smart wallets are the future of e-payments and digital payments but to utilize them to their full potential, we need to secure them from malicious actors who have already started exploiting various vulnerabilities in the existing wallets. In this work, we study the existing attacks and vulnerabilities and present possible hypothetical attack scenarios which may get executed in future by these particular vulnerabilities. We have surveyed on different attacks with comparison of attack cost and benefits of the attacker and comparison of mitigation cost and damage cost of each attack. We focus on the different attacks and usecases on the blockchain smart wallets which would help developers to secure the smart wallets. We describe each attack with its mechanism, usecase, benefits and requirements of attacker for successful attack with the possible damage scenarios and consequences, comparison of attack cost and benefits, comparison of mitigation cost and damage cost, possible mitigation and some security measures for each attack.