Evaluation of Contemporary Smart Contract Analysis Tools

Abstract

Smart contracts are an innovative technology built into Blockchain 2.0 that enables the same program (business logic) to run on multiple nodes for consistent results. Smart contracts are widely used in current Blockchain systems such as Ethereum for different purposes such as transferring cryptocurrencies. However, smart contracts can be vulnerable due to intentional or unintentional injection of bugs, and due to the immutable nature of the Blockchain, any bugs or errors become permanent once published, which can lead to smart contract developers and users suffering from significant economic loss. To avoid such problems, it is necessary to perform vulnerabilities detection to the smart contracts before deployment, and a large number of analysis tools have also emerged to ensure the security. However, the quality of the analysis tools that currently exist on the market varies widely, and there is a lack of systematic quality assessment of these tools. Our research aims to fill this gap by conducting a systematic evaluation of some existing smart contract analysis tools.