SmartUpdater: Enabling Transparent, Automated, and Secure Maintenance of Stateful Smart Contracts

Smart contracts in the Ethereum system are stored tamper-resistant, complicating necessary maintenance for offering new functionalities or fixing security vulnerabilities. Previous contract maintenance approaches mainly focus on logic modification using delegatecall-based patterns. While popular, they fail to handle data state updates (like storage layout changes), leading to impracticality and security risks in real-world applications. To address these challenges, this paper introduces SmartUpdater, a novel toolchain designed for transparent, automated, and secure maintenance of stateful smart contracts. SmartUpdater employs a hyperproxy-based contract maintenance pattern, where the hyperproxy serves as a constant entry and ensures that any state/logic modifications remain transparent to end users. SmartUpdater automates the maintenance process in terms of development streamlining, gas cost efficiency, and state migration verifiability. In extensive evaluations, we show that SmartUpdater can reduce gas consumption in contract maintenance compared with actual maintenance approaches. The evaluations point out the potential of SmartUpdater to significantly simplify the maintenance process for developers.