Smart contracts have been plagued by security incidents, which resulted in substantial financial losses. Given numerous research efforts in addressing the security issues of smart contracts, researchers wondered how software practitioners build security into smart contracts in practice.
Recently, the research group led by Dr Xiaohu Yang performed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies with 13 interviewees and 156 survey respondents from 35 countries across six continents to understand practitioners’ perceptions and practices on smart contract security.
This study uncovers practitioners’ motivations and deterrents of smart contract security, as well as how security efforts and strategies fit into the development lifecycle.
It also finds that blockchain platforms have a statistically significant impact on practitioners’ security perceptions and practices of smart contract development.
Based on the key findings, the group highlights future research directions and provide recommendations for practitioners.
The work was accepted by the 43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021), and to learn more please visit [2102.10963v1] Smart Contract Security: a Practitioners' Perspective (arxiv.org).
About Professor Yang
Xiaohu Yang is a jointly appointed professor at College of Computer Science & Technology and SIAS, Zhejiang University. He is the Director of Blockchain Research Center and Vice Director of Computer Software Institute at Zhejiang University.
He is the co-founder of State Street Zhejiang University Technology Center, a joint research center set up in 2001 by State Street Corporation and Zhejiang University, for advanced research and development of global financial software systems and technologies. Since then, he has been leading the Technology Center, and brought it up from 15 people to more than thousand people up-to-date.
His research interests include software engineering, blockchain, and cloud computing. He received the B.S. degree, the M.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree all in computer science at Zhejiang University in 1988, 1990, and 1993 respectively.
About SIAS
Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University (SIAS) is a jointly launched new institution of research and development by Shanghai Municipal Government and Zhejiang University in June, 2020. The platform represents an intersection of technology and economic development, serving as a market leading trail blazer to cultivate a novel community for innovation amongst enterprises.
SIAS is seeking top talents working on the frontiers of computational sciences who can envision and actualize a research program that will bring out new solutions to areas include, but not limited to, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Biology, Computational Engineering and Fintech.