Versioned Analysis of Software Quality Indicators and Self-admitted Technical Debt in Ethereum Smart Contracts with Ethstractor
Khalid Hassan, Saeed Moradi, Shaiful Chowdhury, Sara Rouhani

TL;DR
This paper introduces Ethstractor, a tool for collecting versioned smart contracts, and evaluates code metrics as vulnerability indicators, revealing their ineffectiveness and the persistence of technical debt.
Contribution
It presents Ethstractor for dataset collection and assesses code metrics' reliability in detecting vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts.
Findings
Code metrics are ineffective in signaling vulnerabilities.
Vulnerabilities in smart contracts remain consistent over versions.
Most self-admitted technical debt is never removed.
Abstract
The rise of decentralized applications (dApps) has made smart contracts imperative components of blockchain technology. As many smart contracts process financial transactions, their security is paramount. Moreover, the immutability of blockchains makes vulnerabilities in smart contracts particularly challenging because it requires deploying a new version of the contract at a different address, incurring substantial fees paid in Ether. This paper proposes Ethstractor, the first smart contract collection tool for gathering a dataset of versioned smart contracts. The collected dataset is then used to evaluate the reliability of code metrics as indicators of vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Our findings indicate that code metrics are ineffective in signalling the presence of vulnerabilities. Furthermore, we investigate whether vulnerabilities in newer versions of smart contracts are…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEconomic and Technological Systems Analysis · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
