Intent-Bound Authorization for Cryptocurrency Withdrawals Under Backend Compromise (arXiv (Cornell University))

Summary

• The Intent-Bound Withdrawal Authorization Protocol (IWAP) introduces an independent enforcement boundary to prevent unauthorized cryptocurrency transfers during backend compromise.p.1
• A Python reference monitor rejected 1,200 negative synthetic requests across 12 scenario families without admitting any unauthorized transactions.p.1
• The implementation successfully admitted 3,000 valid synthetic requests across 30 seeds in single-host local testing.p.1
• The paper references real-world vulnerabilities such as the February 2025 Bybit security breach where attackers stole more than USD 1.4 billion in assets via frontend code injection.p.2

Key insights

1. Hardware key protection and remote attestation alone cannot prevent malicious withdrawals if a compromised service can persuade signing infrastructure to approve arbitrary transaction bytes.p.1
2. IWAP decouples service access credentials from transaction admission by enforcing exact intent binding and single-use budget state at independent signers.p.2
3. Approving visual interface content rather than the decoded cryptographic bytes allows attackers to execute unauthorized smart contract calls, as seen in the USD 1.4 billion Bybit exploit.p.2
4. The IWAP admission predicate strictly requires valid intent, exact parameter matching, allowed operations, fresh evidence, current epoch, committed reservation, and no active pause.p.4
5. Inexpensive deterministic checks precede database state reservation to ensure invalid requests do not consume operational spending capacity.p.3
6. Even if an attacker completely compromises the intent authority, independent budget monitoring preserves a hard cap on maximum financial exposure during a given epoch.p.5
7. The local reference monitor demonstrated single-host verification performance with 95th and 99th percentiles of 0.337 and 0.487 ms respectively.p.6