Vulnerabilities and Open Issues of Smart Contracts: A Systematic Mapping

TL;DR

This paper systematically maps existing research on smart contract vulnerabilities, highlighting current tools, methods, and gaps to improve security and reliability in blockchain applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current initiatives and tools for analyzing smart contract vulnerabilities and identifies research gaps for future exploration.

Findings

Many tools focus on vulnerability detection in smart contracts

Significant research gaps remain in comprehensive security solutions

The study highlights the need for standardized testing approaches

Abstract

Smart Contracts (SCs) are programs stored in a Blockchain to ensure agreements between two or more parties. Due to the unchangeable essence of Blockchain, failures or errors in SCs become perpetual once published. The reliability of SCs is essential to avoid financial losses. So, SCs must be checked to ensure the absence of errors. Hence, many studies addressed new methods and tools for zero-bug software in SCs. This paper conducted a systematic literature mapping identifying initiatives and tools to analyze SCs and how to deal with the identified vulnerabilities. Besides, this work identifies gaps that may lead to research topics for future work.