Systematic Review of Security Vulnerabilities in Ethereum Blockchain Smart Contract

Abstract

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that enables users to communicate in a trust-less manner. It revolutionizes the modes of business between organizations without the need for a trusted third party. It is a distributed ledger technology based on a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network. It enables users to store data globally on thousands of computers in an immutable format and empowers users to deploy small pieces of programs known as smart contracts. The blockchain-based smart contract enables auto enforcement of the agreed terms between two untrusted parties. There are several security vulnerabilities in Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts, due to which sometimes it does not behave as intended. Because a smart contract can hold millions of dollars as cryptocurrency, so these security vulnerabilities can lead to disastrous losses. In this paper, a systematic review of the security vulnerabilities in the Ethereum blockchain is presented. The main objective is to discuss Ethereum smart contract security vulnerabilities, detection tools, real life attacks and preventive mechanisms. Comparisons are drawn among the Ethereum smart contract analysis tools by considering various features. From the extensive depth review, various issues associated with the Ethereum blockchain-based smart contract are highlighted. Finally, various future directions are also discussed in the field of the Ethereum blockchain-based smart contract that can help the researchers to set the directions for future research in this domain.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• smart contract
• decentralized
• ethereum
• vulnerabilities
• security analysis tool