Capturing the State of the Ethereum Ecosystem
Open Access
- Author:
- Gwaltney, Luke Royston
- Area of Honors:
- Computer Science
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Patrick Drew Mcdaniel, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. John Joseph Hannan, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- cryptocurrency
Ethereum
Bitcoin
security
smart contracts - Abstract:
- The Ethereum protocol has emerged as the most promising way to develop decentralized applications (also called smart contracts) onto a blockchain. However, the definitions of how these applications should behave remain unclear. Already there have been cases in which a vulnerability in one smart contract resulted in the locking up or theft of several millions of US dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency. Several tools have been constructed to detect similar bugs in these contracts before they are published to the blockchain. Nevertheless, these tools can be improved upon to ensure more security for the Ethereum ecosystem. A step in the right direction is developing a firm understanding of how these contracts behave in practice. In this study, we give a brief overview of the available security tools for smart contracts. We then parse the Ethereum blockchain’s transaction history to gather Ether balance, popularity, and an instruction count for each contract. By doing this, we hope to find a relationship between the characteristics of a contract and the likelihood the contract is flagged for a vulnerability by the current contract security tools. The relationship, or relationships, that we find with this data can be used to develop deeper security tools that better define how these smart contracts should behave.