MYTHRIL: THE NEW ETHEREUM BLOCKCHAIN ERROR DETECTOR

Cyber ​​security expert Bernhard Mueller has just made available to the users and developers of the Ethereum blockchain a tool capable of disassembling, exploring and analyzing the blockchain for errors. Dubbed in honor of the fictional metal of Tolkien Middle-earth, Mythril is its name.

Mueller, after studying variables such as the programming language used by Ethereum, Solidity, some of the catastrophes caused by errors in its implementation and certain intelligent contract analysis tools in the blockchain, concluded that these presented limitations that prevented him from working efficiently. Which led him step by step to developing Mythril.

Mythril is a blockchain exploration and error interception tool that allows you to search, disassemble, and analyze smart contracts in the Ethereum blockchain. Its command line is made in Python programming language, which makes its commissioning require special procedures compared to similar tools.

Its variety of uses is described by its author in a statement, which also explains how to apply this tool in different scenarios. However, for him, the uses described in the document "are only the tip of the iceberg" because, because it is open source, it facilitates other developers to build improvements based on Mythril, expanding its versatility and improving its quality.

As well as Mythril, there are other options in the field of decompilation and analysis of blokchains. These include Etherscan, Truffle, Remix, Testrpc, and Porosity, which perform functions similar to those of Mythril, trying to find and even correct errors found in the smart contracts of the Ethereum blockchain.

However, these tools brought with them what for Mueller was an impediment in relation to the use of the Python programming language. This led him to start working on a command line and modules in this language that would fulfill the functions that Mythril performs.

The creation of blockchains analysis tools comes from the need to find present errors in the creation of intelligent contracts that are executed in a blockchain so as to strengthen them and eliminate vulnerabilities. These are a means of transferring not only information but also multiple types of electronic transactions, they become a sure target of attacks by hackers and cybercriminals.
We can only speculate on the kind of vulnerabilities that could be hidden in the thousands of contracts deployed in the blockchain, many of which are 'black boxes' (in the sense that their source codes have not been published in Etherscan)

Bernhard Mueller
Senior Consultant, Vantage Point Security
One of the most recent cases was the case with the multifarious portfolio Parity, which suffered an attack that caused millionaire losses to several projects housed in the blockchain of Ethereum. The theft was alluded to by errors in the intelligent contracts written in the programming language used in this blockchain, Solidity. The high complexity of the same, and the "unintuitive" that is for developers (in Mueller's words), lends itself to make such errors happen frequently.