Detecting functional and security-related issues in smart contracts: A systematic literature review

Blockchain is a platform of distributed elaboration, which allows users to provide software for a huge range of next-generation decentralized applications without involving reliable third parties. Smart contracts (SCs) are an important component in blockchain applications: they are programmatic agreements among two or more parties that cannot be rescinded. Furthermore, SCs have an important characteristic: they allow users to implement reliable transactions without involving third parties. However, the advantages of SCs have a price. Like any program, SCs can contain bugs, some of which may also constitute security threats. Writing correct and secure SCs can be extremely difficult because, once deployed, they cannot be modified. Although SCs have been recently introduced, a large number of approaches have been proposed to find bugs and vulnerabilities in SCs. In this article, we present a systematic literature review on the approaches for the automated detection of bugs and vulnerabilities in SCs. We survey 68 papers published between 2015 and 2020, and we annotate each paper according to our classification framework to provide quantitative results and find possible areas not explored yet. Finally, we identify the open problems in this research field to provide possible directions to future researchers.