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Smart contracts---stateful executable objects hosted on blockchains like Ethereum---carry billions of dollars worth of coins and cannot be updated once deployed. We present a new systematic characterization of a class of trace…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-03-15 Ivica Nikolic , Aashish Kolluri , Ilya Sergey , Prateek Saxena , Aquinas Hobor

Smart contracts on public blockchains now manage large amounts of value, and vulnerabilities in these systems can lead to substantial losses. As AI agents become more capable at reading, writing, and running code, it is natural to ask how…

Ethereum has become a widely used platform to enable secure, Blockchain-based financial and business transactions. However, many identified bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts have led to serious financial losses, which raises…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhipeng Gao

Ethereum has officially provided a set of system-level cryptographic APIs to enhance smart contracts with cryptographic capabilities. These APIs have been utilized in over 10% of Ethereum transactions, motivating developers to implement…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Jiashuo Zhang , Yiming Shen , Jiachi Chen , Jianzhong Su , Yanlin Wang , Ting Chen , Jianbo Gao , Zhong Chen

The widespread lack of broad source code verification on blockchain explorers such as Etherscan, where despite 78,047,845 smart contracts deployed on Ethereum (as of May 26, 2025), a mere 767,520 (< 1%) are open source, presents a severe…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Isaac David , Liyi Zhou , Dawn Song , Arthur Gervais , Kaihua Qin

Smart contract platforms facilitate the development of important and diverse distributed applications in a simple manner. This simplicity stems from the inherent utility of employing the state of smart contracts to store, query and verify…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-08-05 Christos Patsonakis , Mema Roussopoulos

Blockchain systems have received much attention and promise to revolutionize many services. Yet, despite their popularity, current blockchain systems exist in isolation, that is, they cannot share information. While interoperability is…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-04-24 Enrique Fynn , Alysson Bessani , Fernando Pedone

Smart contracts are programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. However, designing and implementing a smart contract is not trivial since upon deployment on a blockchain, it is no longer possible to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Chaïmaa Benabbou , Önder Gürcan

The proxy design pattern allows Ethereum smart contracts to be simultaneously immutable and upgradeable, in which an original contract is split into a proxy contract containing the data storage and a logic contract containing the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Cheng-Kang Chen , Wen-Yi Chu , Muoi Tran , Laurent Vanbever , Hsu-Chun Hsiao

The evaluation of smart contract reputability is essential to foster trust in decentralized ecosystems. However, existing methods that rely solely on code analysis or transactional data, offer limited insight into evolving trustworthiness.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Cyrus Malik , Josef Bajada , Joshua Ellul

Smart contracts on a blockchain behave precisely as specified by their code. A vulnerability in this code can lead to unexpected behaviour, which is hard to fix because a blockchain does not allow to change smart contract code after its…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Markus Knecht

Smart contracts are autonomous and immutable pieces of code that are deployed on blockchain networks and run by miners. They were first introduced by Ethereum in 2014 and have since been used for various applications such as security…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Mahdi Fooladgar , Fathiyeh Faghih

Smart contracts are blockchain programs that often handle valuable assets. Writing secure smart contracts is far from trivial, and any vulnerability may lead to significant financial losses. To support developers in identifying and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Monika di Angelo , Thomas Durieux , João F. Ferreira , Gernot Salzer

Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2017-02-16 Thomas Dickerson , Paul Gazzillo , Maurice Herlihy , Eric Koskinen

Ethereum smart contracts are executable programs deployed on a blockchain. Once deployed, they cannot be updated due to their inherent immutability. Moreover, they often manage valuable assets that are worth millions of dollars, making them…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Konrad Weiss , Christof Ferreira Torres , Florian Wendland

A smart grid is an important application in Industry 4.0 with a lot of new technologies and equipment working together. Hence, sensitive data stored in the smart grid is vulnerable to malicious modification and theft. This paper proposes a…

Since it takes time and effort to put a new product or service on the market, one would like to predict whether it will be a success. In general this is not possible, but it is possible to follow best practices in order to maximise the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-09-02 Pieter Hartel , Ivan Homoliak , Daniël Reijsbergen

This paper presents an architecture of a Personal Information Management System, in which individuals can define the access to their personal data by means of smart contracts. These smart contracts, running on the Ethereum blockchain,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-01-27 Mirko Zichichi , Stefano Ferretti , Gabriele D'Angelo , Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel

The selfdestruct function is provided by Ethereum smart contracts to destroy a contract on the blockchain system. However, it is a double-edged sword for developers. On the one hand, using selfdestruct function enables developers to remove…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Jiachi Chen , Xin Xia , David Lo , John Grundy

Ethereum smart contracts are an innovation built on top of the blockchain technology, which provides a platform for automatically executing contracts in an anonymous, distributed, and trusted way. The problem is magnified by the fact that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Jialiang Chang , Bo Gao , Hao Xiao , Jun Sun , Yan Cai , Zijiang Yang