Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
1-2022
Abstract
Smart contracts are programs running on a blockchain. They are immutable to change, and hence can not be patched for bugs once deployed. Thus it is critical to ensure they are bug-free and well-designed before deployment. A Contract defect is an error, flaw or fault in a smart contract that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways. The detection of contract defects is a method to avoid potential bugs and improve the design of existing code. Since smart contracts contain numerous distinctive features, such as the gas system. decentralized, it is important to find smart contract specified defects. To fill this gap, we collected smart-contract-related posts from Ethereum StackExchange, as well as real-world smart contracts. We manually analyzed these posts and contracts; using them to define 20 kinds of contract defects. We categorized them into indicating potential security, availability, performance, maintainability and reusability problems. To validate if practitioners consider these contract as harmful, we created an online survey and received 138 responses from 32 different countries. Feedback showed these contract defects are harmful and removing them would improve the quality and robustness of smart contracts. We manually identified our defined contract defects in 587 real world smart contract and publicly released our dataset. Finally, we summarized 5 impacts caused by contract defects. These help developers better understand the symptoms of the defects and removal priority.
Keywords
Empirical study, Ethereum, smart contracts, contract defect
Discipline
Contracts | Finance and Financial Management | Information Security | Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Volume
48
Issue
1
First Page
327
Last Page
345
ISSN
0098-5589
Identifier
10.1109/TSE.2020.2989002
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Citation
CHEN, Jiachi; XIA, Xin; LO, David; GRUNDY, John; LUO, Xiapu; and CHEN, Ting.
Defining smart contract defects on Ethereum. (2022). IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 48, (1), 327-345.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6929
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2020.2989002
Included in
Contracts Commons, Finance and Financial Management Commons, Information Security Commons, Software Engineering Commons