Attackers drove 63% of early use of Ethereum’s new smart wallet feature
Ethereum’s shortcut to smart wallet habits arrived with a new belief drawback: a wallet could make an everyday deal with programmable with out transferring the person’s property, whereas the delegated code good points energy to behave with that account’s authority.
A peer-reviewed examine launched for USENIX Security ’26 discovered that attacker-linked contracts had been related to 2,322,548 of the three,664,166 EIP-7702 authorization transactions it noticed throughout seven chains via July 15, 2025. That is 63% of the historic transaction quantity within the researchers’ dataset.
The authors tied a relatively small set of malicious contracts to repeated authorizations and described some attacker-controlled exercise as possible observe or proof-of-concept testing throughout an early, exploratory part.
The determine measures transactions, whereas distinct-wallet prevalence and the present 2026 assault fee sit exterior the examine’s scope.
Why attackers dominated the early authorization rely
Ethereum activated Pectra, together with EIP-7702, on May 7, 2025. The final specification launched a type-4 transaction that lets an externally owned account set a pointer to deployed contract code.
The deal with stays the identical, the unique personal key retains management, and calls to the account can execute the delegated code within the account’s context.
That design can provide a traditional wallet options related to smart accounts, together with batched calls and sponsored transactions, with out forcing the person emigrate to a new deal with. It additionally turns the delegation goal into wallet infrastructure.
Buggy or hostile code might be able to make approvals, transfers and software calls because the account.
It says functions shouldn’t anticipate to ask customers for arbitrary authorization signatures as a result of there isn’t a protected generic interface for customers to evaluate code with unrestricted account entry. Wallets are anticipated to vet the implementation.
Attackers might put together authorization fields off-chain and ask a sufferer to signal, and a wallet would possibly cut back the choice to a high-level account-upgrade immediate whereas obscuring the contract deal with or code receiving authority.
The protocol verifies the account proprietor’s signature, whereas the wallet nonetheless has to determine whether or not the chosen code deserves management.
The researchers analyzed greater than 22.8 billion historic transactions on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Base, and Gnosis.
Within that information, they examined 3,664,166 EIP-7702 authorizations via the cutoff and used transaction filters, bytecode evaluation and handbook evaluation to establish 924 malicious contracts. They categorised 793 as EOA-targeted, 124 as contract-account-targeted and 7 as composite assaults.
| Study measure | What it captures |
|---|---|
| 3,664,166 authorizations | Historical EIP-7702 transactions throughout seven chains via July 15, 2025 |
| 2,322,548 authorizations, or 63% | Historical transactions related to malicious EOA-targeted contracts |
| 924 malicious contracts | The detected and manually reviewed set beneath the researchers’ methodology |
| $2.36 million | Detected realized loss throughout three assault classes |
| About $10.14 million | Potential publicity in a separate legacy-contract subset |
The paper says malicious contracts had been reused disproportionately, so transaction counts can rise a lot sooner than the quantity of distinct contracts or affected customers. In a younger authorization market, that repeated attacker exercise had an outsized impact on the denominator.
Attackers discovered a repeatable path to account-level authority earlier than wallets had made the belief resolution as legible and constrained as the ability it conveyed.
The danger reaches past hijacked wallets
The examine measured $2,362,848.76 in realized losses throughout its three assault classes. A separate estimate lined older contracts whose defenses assumed that programmable EOAs couldn’t exist.
EIP-7702 breaks the previous assumption that msg.sender == tx.origin reliably identifies a plain EOA or blocks contract-mediated habits.
The researchers recognized 967 lively Ethereum contracts in a subset utilizing that test as a flash-loan protection and estimated that about $10.1 million in property had been at potential high danger.
Detected theft totaled about $2.36 million, so the $10.14 million represents property uncovered by a defensive assumption that now not held.
The researchers noticed attackers rebinding accounts to benign code after an assault, making current-state-only monitoring unreliable. They additionally discovered 500 particular nonzero delegation targets with no deployed code.
A precomputed CREATE2 deal with might obtain code later, altering what the account executes whereas the recorded goal stays the identical.
Those patterns make authorization historical past half of the safety boundary. Wallets and monitoring instruments want to recollect the place an account beforehand pointed, consider modifications in delegated code, and deal with an undeployed goal as unresolved moderately than innocent.
The authors’ guidelines could miss malicious contracts earlier than preparation transactions grow to be seen or assaults utilizing novel interfaces exterior the tactic’s protection. The 924 contracts are the detected and manually verified set, whereas the whole universe of abuse stays unknown.
Safe default habits begins with making delegation a wallet-controlled set up resolution. Post-study ethereum.org guidance requires whitelisting delegation contracts, prominently displaying the goal, avoiding arbitrary delegation on {hardware} wallets, and counting on audited implementations.
An account-abstraction wallet capability proposal takes the identical path, calling for a strict shortlist of well-known, publicly audited smart account implementations. These paperwork don’t measure how persistently manufacturing wallets have adopted it.
Applications ought to request the feature they want and depart the account implementation to the wallet. For an approval and swap in a single movement, present Ethereum Foundation steering factors builders to a wallet interface akin to ERC-5792.
The wallet can then select EIP-7702, ERC-4337, or one other account system with out asking the person to approve low-level delegation code chosen by the appliance.
Current steering recommends signing initialization parameters or proscribing setup to the ERC-4337 EntryPoint, closing a front-running path during which an attacker substitutes their very own values.
The examine recognized a associated failure mode in legacy wallet code: constructors don’t run once more when an account delegates to an current contract, which may depart possession unset and externally claimable.
A benign present pointer can’t erase a malicious historical past, and a goal with no code could purchase habits later. Wallets want sturdy authorization information, clear alerts when the delegation modifications, and a removing path that customers can perceive.
Making the EIP-7702 wallet programmability protected by default requires wallets to deal with delegation as set up of the account’s management aircraft: prohibit who can request it, expose precisely what is going to management the account, confirm the way it initializes, and maintain watching after the pointer modifications.
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