Ethereum smart contract security research: survey and future research opportunities
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Ethereum smart contract security research: survey and future research opportunities Zeli WANG1,2, Hai JIN1,2 , Weiqi DAI 1
1,3,4
, Kim-Kwang Raymond CHOO5, Deqing ZOU1,3,4
National Engineering Research Center for Big Data Technology and System, Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Clusters and Grid Computing Lab, Hubei Engineering Research Center on Big Data Security, Wuhan 430074, China 2 School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China 3 School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China 4 Shenzhen Huazhong University of Science and Technology Research Institute, Shenzhen 518057, China 5 Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX 78249-0631, USA
c Higher Education Press 2020
Abstract Blockchain has recently emerged as a research trend, with potential applications in a broad range of industries and context. One particular successful Blockchain technology is smart contract, which is widely used in commercial settings (e.g., high value financial transactions). This, however, has security implications due to the potential to financially benefit from a security incident (e.g., identification and exploitation of a vulnerability in the smart contract or its implementation). Among, Ethereum is the most active and arresting. Hence, in this paper, we systematically review existing research efforts on Ethereum smart contract security, published between 2015 and 2019. Specifically, we focus on how smart contracts can be maliciously exploited and targeted, such as security issues of contract program model, vulnerabilities in the program and safety consideration introduced by program execution environment. We also identify potential research opportunities and future research agenda. Keywords smart contract, security, blockchain, vulnerability, unreliable data
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Introduction and motivation
The “first wave” of cryptocurrency research probably takes place between the 1980’s to early 2000’s, such as “anonymous transactions” [1], “online shopping without bank” [2], DigiCash [3], and Peppercoin [4]. The Blockchain-based Bitcoin was proposed in late 2000s [5], and since the popularity of Bitcoin, a number of altcoins, including Blockchain-based altcoins, have been proposed in the literature and market. For example, there are approximately 2,169 cryptocurrencies been tracked by CoinMarketCap. It is, perhaps, the popularity of Bitcoin that the market recognizes the potential of Blockchain, for example its capability to achieve properties such as decentralization, tamper-proofing, transparency, and traceability. In the Received August 6, 2019; accepted December 25, 2019 E-mail: [email protected]
past few years, there have been a number of Blockchain-related studies focusing on a broad range of applications [6–20]. In addition to Bitcoin, another widely successful Blockchain application is Ethereum [21], which uses Turing-complete programing
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