Security Vulnerabilities and Countermeasures of Smart Contracts: A Survey
Epherem Merete Sifra
Abstract
Recently, blockchain-based smart contracts have become popular because of their immunity, decentralization, and security insurance in a trustless environment. However, they are highly susceptible to various security risks, so it is necessary to systematically investigate existing security countermeasures and use unified evaluation criteria. There have been some surveys on the security of blockchain-based smart contracts, albeit they have failed to conduct a reasonable analysis of existing security solutions with a unified criterion. Therefore, this article comprehensively investigates the latest work on security of blockchain-based smart contracts. For better understanding, we will design a security model that represents blockchain-based smart contracts. Furthermore, we analyze the security requirements of blockchain and smart contracts and used these requirements as evaluation criteria to study the works under investigation. Finally, based on the results of the analysis, we present a series of open research issues and future directions to stimulate research work on protecting blockchain-based smart contracts.