short-paper

Towards analyzing the complexity landscape of solidity based ethereum smart contracts

Author:

Péter HegedűsAuthors Info & Claims

WETSEB '18: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain

Pages 35 - 39

https://doi.org/10.1145/3194113.3194119

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

The blockchain based decentralized cryptocurrency platforms are one of the hottest topics in tech at the moment. Though most of the interest is generated by cryptocurrency related activities, it is becoming apparent that a much wider spectrum of applications can leverage the blockchain technology.

The primary concepts enabling such general use of the blockchain are the so-called smart contracts, which are special programs that run on the blockchain. One of the most popular blockchain platforms that supports smart contracts are Ethereum. As smart contracts typically handle money, ensuring their low number of faults and vulnerabilities are essential. To aid smart contract developers and help maturing the technology, we need analysis tools and studies for smart contracts.

As an initiative for this, we propose the adoption of some well-known OO metrics for Solidity smart contracts. Furthermore, we analyze more than 10,000 smart contracts with our prototype tool. The results suggest that smart contract programs are short, not overly complex and either quite well-commented or not commented at all. Moreover, smart contracts could benefit from an external library and dependency management mechanism, as more than 80% of the defined libraries in Solidity files code the same functionalities.

References

[1]

Vitalik Buterin et al. 2013. Ethereum white paper. GitHub repository (2013).

Google Scholar

[2]

Vitalik Buterin et al. 2014. A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform. white paper (2014).

Google Scholar

[3]

Shyam R Chidamber and Chris F Kemerer. 1994. A metrics suite for object oriented design. IEEE Transactions on software engineering 20, 6 (1994), 476--493.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Phil Daian. 2016. Analysis of the DAO exploit. http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao-exploit/. (2016).

Google Scholar

[5]

Chris Dannen. 2017. Solidity Programming. In Introducing Ethereum and Solidity. Springer, 69--88.

Google Scholar

[6]

Loi Luu, Duc-Hiep Chu, Hrishi Olickel, Prateek Saxena, and Aquinas Hobor. 2016. Making smart contracts smarter. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. ACM, 254--269.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Thomas J McCabe. 1976. A complexity measure. IEEE Transactions on software Engineering 4 (1976), 308--320.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. (2008).

Google Scholar

[9]

N Szabo. 1997. Nick Szabo - the idea of smart contracts. Nick Szabo's Papers and Concise Tutorials. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/smart_contracts_idea.html (1997).

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Liu YHe JLi XChen JLiu XPeng SCao HWang Y(2024)An overview of blockchain smart contract execution mechanismJournal of Industrial Information Integration10.1016/j.jii.2024.10067441(100674)Online publication date: Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jii.2024.100674
Reno SPriya SAl-Kafi GTasfia STurna M(2024)A novel approach to optimizing transaction processing rate and space requirement of blockchain via off-chain architectureInternational Journal of Information Technology10.1007/s41870-023-01685-x16:4(2379-2394)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-023-01685-x
Han QWang LZhang HShi LWang D(2024)Ethchecker: a context-guided fuzzing for smart contractsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-024-05954-980:10(13949-13975)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-05954-9
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Code cloning in smart contracts: a case study on verified contracts from the Ethereum blockchain platform
Abstract
Ethereum is a blockchain platform that hosts and executes smart contracts. Smart contracts have been used to implement cryptocurrencies and crowdfunding initiatives (ICOs). A major concern in Ethereum is the security of smart contracts. Different ...
Introduction to Bitcoins, Blockchains and Smart Contracts
SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

This workshop introduces participants to bitcoins, blockchains and programming smart contracts using Ethereum Blockchains and the Solidity programming language. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins use Blockchains and Smart Contracts to enforce ...
Hierarchical interactions between Ethereum smart contracts across Testnets
CryBlock'18: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains for Distributed Systems

Although the primary role of decentralized ledgers, such as blockchains in cryptocurrencies, is to store data related to interactions between users to establish trust within incognizant parties, their capabilities allow them to offer more sophisticated ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

WETSEB '18: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain

May 2018

70 pages

ISBN:9781450357265

DOI:10.1145/3194113

Program Chairs:
Roberto Tonelli
University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
,
Giuseppe Destefanis
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom
,
Steve Counsell
Brunel University London, United Kingdom
,
Michele Marchesi
University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 May 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Short-paper

Conference

ICSE '18

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT
IEEE-CS

ICSE '18: 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 27, 2018

Gothenburg, Sweden

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

39
Total Citations
View Citations
454
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)82
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 14 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Liu YHe JLi XChen JLiu XPeng SCao HWang Y(2024)An overview of blockchain smart contract execution mechanismJournal of Industrial Information Integration10.1016/j.jii.2024.10067441(100674)Online publication date: Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jii.2024.100674
Reno SPriya SAl-Kafi GTasfia STurna M(2024)A novel approach to optimizing transaction processing rate and space requirement of blockchain via off-chain architectureInternational Journal of Information Technology10.1007/s41870-023-01685-x16:4(2379-2394)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-023-01685-x
Han QWang LZhang HShi LWang D(2024)Ethchecker: a context-guided fuzzing for smart contractsThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-024-05954-980:10(13949-13975)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-024-05954-9
Badra RSliman LDhraief A(2024)Smart Contracts Vulnerability Detection Using TransformersWeb Information Systems Engineering – WISE 202410.1007/978-981-96-0576-7_12(151-165)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-0576-7_12
Monika Bhatia RKumar M(2024)An extensive multivocal literature review of blockchain technologyTransactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies10.1002/ett.503735:11Online publication date: 23-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/ett.5037
Shen ZChen YZhang W(2023)GSVD: Common Vulnerability Dataset for Smart Contracts on BSC and PolygonAdvanced Information Technologies and Applications10.5121/csit.2023.130601(01-16)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.5121/csit.2023.130601
Mendoza Arvizo AAvelar Sosa LGarcía Alcaraz JCruz-Mejía O(2023)Beneficiary Contracts on a Lightweight Blockchain Architecture Using Smart Contracts: A Smart Healthcare System for Medical RecordsApplied Sciences10.3390/app1311669413:11(6694)Online publication date: 31-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/app13116694
Huang QLiao DXing ZZuo ZWang CXia X(2023)Semantic-Enriched Code Knowledge Graph to Reveal Unknowns in Smart Contract Code ReuseACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/359720632:6(1-37)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1145/3597206
Alkadi RShoufan A(2023)Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Traffic Management Solution Using Crowd-Sensing and BlockchainIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2022.320181720:1(201-215)Online publication date: Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2022.3201817
Yu LLu JLiu XYang LZhang FMa J(2023)PSCVFinder: A Prompt-Tuning Based Framework for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection2023 IEEE 34th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE59848.2023.00030(556-567)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE59848.2023.00030
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Recommendations

Code cloning in smart contracts: a case study on verified contracts from the Ethereum blockchain platform

Introduction to Bitcoins, Blockchains and Smart Contracts

Hierarchical interactions between Ethereum smart contracts across Testnets