Ethernaut is a game that allows you learn about smart contract security by teaching you how to hack smart contracts

I love Ethernaut. I love that it has a Rick and Morty Difficulty meter:

I love the psychedelic console message styling.

⛏️ Sent transaction ⛏

⛏️ Mined transaction ⛏

And I love that the name was inspired from a weird comic from the 50s about an alien invasion with killer snow.

Level 0 - Hello Ethernaut

I’m going to assume that you’ve got some basic coding skills and knowledge of Solidity (the language used to code in Ethereum). Crypto Zombies is a great introduction if you are completely new to smart contracts.

Alright then, let’s get started! Hello Ethernaut is a practice run to get acquainted with the game interface. You’ll need to set up a MetaMask account, if you don’t have one already. Choose the Ropsten Test Network and get some test ether from this faucet. Follow the level instructions closely and you should be fine. It’s fairly straightforward.

Each level has it’s own contract. You can interact with contracts by calling their methods:

await contract . theMethodName ()

The password for this level can be found with:

await contract . password () // "ethernaut0"

And we can use that to authenticate:

await contract . authenticate ( " ethernaut0 " )

Here’s a screen shot of what you should see:

Level 1 - Fallback

Once you’re familiar with the mechanics of the game, it’s time to jump into the first level proper: Fallback. This a great opportunity to brush up on some concepts like:

I’m going to go through this level’s contract with a fine tooth comb. If you just want to know how to complete the level, you can skip to the solution here. But if you really want to grok Solidity, you need to get your coding hands dirty.

Checking the balance

Let’s get started by checking the level’s contract balance. We can do this with the command:

await getBalance ( instance ) // "0"

A big round 0! I guess we’re just doing this for bragging rights! Pro tip: instance is equivalent to contract.address .

If you like, you can check your own balance as well:

await getBalance ( player )

The Contract Owner

To beat this level we need to claim ownership of the contract, so we need to know what that means!

There is no inherit contract owner property in Solidity. However, since there are certain actions that you will only want the contract owner to be allowed to do, it makes sense to set an owner address with special privileges.

Open Zeppelin have created Ownable.sol , an open source resource for this purpose.

It’s included in the contract with:

import ' zeppelin-solidity/contracts/ownership/Ownable.sol ' ;

In the Ownable contract, a public address named owner is declared:

address public owner ;

owner is used as a mechanism to ensure that only the contract owner can execute some functions by using the function modifier:

modifier onlyOwner () { require ( msg . sender == owner ); _ ; }

It’s used in the withdraw() function for example:

function withdraw () public onlyOwner { //...

so that only the contract owner can withdraw funds from the contract.

The Ownable() function assigns ownership to the msg.sender .

function Ownable () public { owner = msg . sender ; }

The function Ownable() is used when the contract is declared,

contract Fallback is Ownable { //...

And as a result the contract’s owner will be assigned to whomever creates the contract.

The ABI

So now we understand how the contract has an owner. Let’s have a look at the contract’s ABI (Application Binary Interface). You can think of the ABI as a low-level type of API. The ABI includes all of the contracts methods, as well as its constructor and events. We can log the ABI contents in a table format with:

console . table ( contract . abi )

So what’s in this ABI? Six functions, a constructor, a fallback, and an event.

constant type name inputs outputs payable stateMutability anonymous true function contributions 1 1 false view constructor 0 false nonpayable false function contribute 0 0 true payable true function getContribution 0 1 false view false function withdraw 0 0 false nonpayable fallback true payable true function owner 0 1 false view false function transferOwnership 1 0 false nonpayable event OwnershipTransferred 2 false

The columns detail the various interface properties.Let’s go through them one by one:

A true constant value indicates the method will not modify the blockchain. As a result you can call this method without using any gas. constant has already been deprecated in favour of stateMutability , detailed further down, but is still included for backward compatibility.

value indicates the method will not modify the blockchain. As a result you can this method without using any gas. has already been deprecated in favour of , detailed further down, but is still included for backward compatibility. type indicates what type of interface it is. It can be a function, constructor, a fallback method (we’ll come back to this later), or an event.

indicates what type of interface it is. It can be a function, constructor, a fallback method (we’ll come back to this later), or an event. name is pretty self-explanatory. Note that the constructor and fallback don’t have names.

is pretty self-explanatory. Note that the constructor and fallback don’t have names. inputs and outputs specify the number of function arguments that are expected and outputted respectively.

and specify the number of function arguments that are expected and outputted respectively. payable specifies whether you will have to pay to run this function.

specifies whether you will have to pay to run this function. stateMutability is used as a replacement for constant . pure is used for functions where state isn’t even read (e.g. safeMath type functions) whereas view is used for functions which don’t change state but do read from it. A contract property can also be nonpayable , meaning that it will cost gas to access it, but you can’t send any money to it.

is used as a replacement for . is used for functions where state isn’t even read (e.g. safeMath type functions) whereas is used for functions which don’t change state but do read from it. A contract property can also be , meaning that it will cost gas to access it, but you can’t send any money to it. anonymous only applies to events. Let’s leave this for now.

Ok, onto the methods!

The Methods

contributions(address)

If we look at the source code Open Zeppelin provides, we can see that contributions is actually a public mapping.

mapping ( address => uint ) public contributions ;

We can access this mapping like a function. If we pass an address to it, we will get a uint .

I can see what my contributions are with:

await contract . contributions ( player );

(index) Value 0 length c 0 1 e 0 s 1

Side Note: Numbers in Web3

Wait a second, what? We got an object with three properties. Why didn’t we get a number? Because Web3 uses BigNumber for number values.

You will always get a BigNumber object for number values as JavaScript is not able to handle big numbers correctly.

Note: you can log the contributions as a table with:

console . table ( await contract . contributions ( player ));

The three BigNumber properties represent the coefficient, the exponent, and the sign. An example from the BigNumber README:

x = new BigNumber ( - 123.456 ); x . c // [ 123, 45600000000000 ] coefficient x . e // 2 exponent x . s // -1 sign

We haven’t contributed anything yet, so we would expect our coefficient to be zero, and indeed it is. How about the contract owner’s contribution?

console . table ( await contract . contributions ( await contract . owner ()));

(index) Value 0 length c 10000000 1 e 21 s 1

Remember the c value just represents the coefficient. We need to apply the exponent (e) to determine the actual value. We can convert these numbers to strings so they are easier to read:

( await contract . contributions ( player )) . toString (); // "0" ( await contract . contributions ( await contract . owner ())) . toString (); // "1e+21"

So basically we’ve found out that the owner has a lot more contributions than we do :D

Wei, Gwei and Ether

It’s important to note that the owner’s 1021 contributions are in wei. There are 1018, or one quintillion, wei in one ether. You could also say that an ether is one Exawei (Exa as in Exabyte).

Note that gas price is typically in Gwei (Gigawei), which is 109 wei, or a billion wei.

Unit Amount (Wei) Prefix Description Wei 1 Gwei 1,000,000,000 Giga Billion Ether 1,000,000,000 ,000,000,000 Exa Quintillion

Constructor

Since the contract is called Fallback, the name of the constructor is Fallback . This is confusing in this case, since we also have a fallback (lower case) method, which is nameless. A contract’s fallback is always nameless.

The constructor contains the instructions to be executed when the contract is initialized. We see that when initialized it assigns 1000 ether to msg.sender (who is also the contract owner):

contributions [ msg . sender ] = 1000 * ( 1 ether );

This is why the contract owner has so much more contributions than we do!

So the owner has one thousand ether in their contribution. It’s still a lot but not a crazy amount.

contribute()

Ok, so maybe we should make a contribution ourselves. Here’s the code for contribute() :

function contribute () public payable { require ( msg . value < 0.001 ether ); contributions [ msg . sender ] += msg . value ; if ( contributions [ msg . sender ] > contributions [ owner ]) { owner = msg . sender ; } }

Let’s go through this function line by line. First of all, the msg.value has to be less than 0.001 ether:

require ( msg . value < 0.001 ether );

So we can’t contribute more than ~0.001 ether at a time. The contributions of the sender are increased by whatever value was sent :

contributions [ msg . sender ] += msg . value ;

Finally, if the contributions of the sender are more than the contributions of the owner , the contract’s’ ownership will pass to the sender .

if ( contributions [ msg . sender ] > contributions [ owner ]) { owner = msg . sender ; }

Is there any way for the contributions of the sender to exceed that of the owner? As we saw in the constructor, when the contract is initialized 1000 ether is assigned to the contract’s owner. Since we can’t increase our contributions by more than ~.001 ether at a time, it will take us over a million contributions for our contributions to exceed the owner’s! Hopefully there is an easier way…

Let’s make a contribution anyway, just to keep up appearances. We can make a contribution with:

await contract . contribute . sendTransaction ({ value : toWei (. 0009 )});

We need to use sendTransaction() so we can specify how much ether we want to send. sendTransaction() requires the payment amount in wei, so we convert our 0.0009 ether (just below the 0.001 threshold) to wei with toWei() .

getContribution()

getContribution simply returns the current contributions value of the sender .

function getContribution () public view returns ( uint ) { return contributions [ msg . sender ]; }

We can use getContribution to make sure our contribution has gone through:

await contract . getContribution ()

It’s really just a convenience method, however. We can check our contribution just as easily with:

await contract . contributions ( player )

withdraw()

function withdraw () public onlyOwner { owner . transfer ( this . balance ); }

There’s a couple of variables here we haven’t seen before:

transfer() : a global function that can be used to transfer to any address.

: a global function that can be used to transfer to any address. this : the current contract.

: the current contract. balance : the property of an address (in Wei).

The function transfers the entire balance at the contract’s address to that of it’s owner. We can’t use this at the moment, since we aren’t the owner, so let’s move on!

The Fallback Method

Finally we get to the fallback method! This is what the Fallback level is all about, after all.

Every contract can have a function that is used as a fallback if the contract is sent a request that doesn’t match any of it’s methods. It is a function of last resort. The fallback function is not allowed to take any arguments or to return any outputs.

Let’s have a look at this contract’s fallback method:

function () payable public { require ( msg . value > 0 && contributions [ msg . sender ] > 0 ); owner = msg . sender ; }

It assigns ownership to whomever invokes it! However, it requires the message value to be greater than zero, and the contributions of the sender to be greater than zero. We’ve already made a contribution, so all we have to do is make sure the message value is greater than zero. To invoke the callback function, we simply send the contract a transaction using the sendTransaction() method:

await contract . sendTransaction ({ value : 1 });

We can just send 1 wei and still pass the requirement.

The Solution

We’ve covered a lot of ground! Let’s review the steps to complete the level.