An Analysis of Important Factors Affecting the Success of Blockchain Smart Contract Security Vulnerability Scanning Tools

An Analysis of Important Factors Affecting the Success of Blockchain Smart Contract Security Vulnerability Scanning Tools

연구 분야: Infrastructure

학회: BSCI '23: Proceedings of the 5th ACM International Symposium on Blockchain and Secure Critical Infrastructure

Since the proposal and conception of smart contracts in blockchain-based platforms, the ever-growing use of smart contracts also comes with increased vulnerability exploits, leading to attacks causing significant losses. Various improvements and implementations have been made to strengthen smart contract security, including developing scanning tools to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts, both open-source and commercial. These tools were met with varying degrees of success, with some thriving well while others have since stagnated. In this paper, we conducted case studies on six of these tools, three of which are highly regarded and still used today, while the other three have either limited success or have been deprecated. We identified three short-term (6 months or less) and five medium-term (6 to 24 months) factors affecting the tools’ successes. Based on our analysis, we outlined a framework with these factors for potential developers to consider for increasing the success of their projects.