Top

Empirical Software Engineering

Published in:

01-09-2023

Studying differentiated code to support smart contract update

Authors: Xiangping Chen, Peiyong Liao, Queping Kong, Yuan Huang, Xiaocong Zhou

Published in: Empirical Software Engineering | Issue 5/2023

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

Smart contracts have received a lot of attention. A smart contract is a program that runs on a blockchain. Some recent studies reveal that most of the smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain are highly similar. An inexperienced smart contract developer can refer to some existing smart contracts that is similar to their own contracts to help their development by applying the differentiated code from the existing similar contracts. How to identify similar contracts and extract differentiated code to recommend to the developers as guidance is what we aim for in this work. Differentiated code is defined as the source code excluding the repeated part in two similar smart contracts, which usually illustrates how a software feature is implemented or a programming issue is solved. Thus, differentiated code might be used to guide the update of a smart contract. In this paper, we propose a differentiated code recommendation approach, SmartDiffrec, for supporting smart contract update. Specifically, we apply syntax and semantic similarities to discover the similar contracts for a given target contract, and then recommend the differentiated code to the target contract. Moreover, we investigate three research questions to analyze the effectiveness of our approach from the whole to the specific. The results show that the differentiated codes extracted found by our approach can effectively support smart contract update.

previous article Can the configuration of static analyses make resolving security vulnerabilities more effective? - A user study

next article Investigating developers’ perception on software testability and its effects

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1go7a6aL_W03_de4ZmyFg7K7CEb4qGELV?usp=share_link

http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop

https://etherscan.io

A standard interface for tokens. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-20

Atzei N, Bartoletti M, Cimoli T (2017) A survey of attacks on ethereum smart contracts (sok). In: Maffei M, Ryan M (eds) Principles of Security and Trust. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, p 164–186

Bartoletti M, Carta S, Cimoli T, Saia R (2017) Dissecting Ponzi schemes on Ethereum: identification, analysis, and impact. ArXiv e-prints arXiv:1703.03779

Baxter ID, Yahin A, Moura L, Sant’Anna M, Bier L (1998) Clone detection using abstract syntax trees. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, ICSM ’98, p 368 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=850947.853341

Chen T, Li X, Luo X, Zhang X (2017) Under-optimized smart contracts devour your money. In: IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), p 442–446 https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2017.7884650

Chen T, Li X, Wang Y, Chen J, Li Z, Luo X, Au MH, Zhang X (2017) An adaptive gas cost mechanism for ethereum to defend against under-priced dos attacks. In: Liu JK, Samarati P (eds) Information Security Practice and Experience. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 3–24CrossRef

Chen T, Zhu Y, Li Z, Chen J, Li X, Luo X, Lin X, Zhange X (2018) Understanding ethereum via graph analysis. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, p 1484–1492 https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8486401

Chen T, Li Z, Zhang Y, Luo X, Wang T, Hu T, Xiao X, Wang D, Huang J, Zhang X (2019a) A large-scale empirical study on control flow identification of smart contracts. In: 2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), p 1–11

Chen T, Zhang Y, Li Z, Luo X, Wang T, Cao R, Xiao X, Zhang X (2019b) Tokenscope: Automatically detecting inconsistent behaviors of cryptocurrency tokens in ethereum. In: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, p 1503–1520

Chen W, Zheng Z, Cui J, Ngai E, Zheng P, Zhou Y (2018) Detecting ponzi schemes on ethereum: Towards healthier blockchain technology. In: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, WWW ’18, p 1409–1418 https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186046

Christidis K, Devetsikiotis M (2016) Blockchains and smart contracts for the internet of things. IEEE Access 4:2292–2303. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2566339CrossRef

Cordy JR (2006) The txl source transformation language. Science of Computer Programming, special Issue on The Fourth Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools, and Applications (LDTA ’04) 61(3):190–210 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2006.04.002, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167642306000669,

Cordy JR, Roy CK (2011) The nicad clone detector. In: IEEE 19th International Conference on Program Comprehension, p 219–220 https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2011.26

Dickerson T, Gazzillo P, Herlihy M, Koskinen E (2017) Adding concurrency to smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, ACM, New York, NY, USA, PODC ’17, pp 303–312 https://doi.org/10.1145/3087801.3087835

Dinh TTA, Liu R, Zhang M, Chen G, Ooi BC, Wang J (2018) Untangling blockchain: A data processing view of blockchain systems. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 30(7):1366–1385. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2017.2781227CrossRef

Elmay FK, Salah K, Jayaraman R, Omar IA (2022) Using nfts and blockchain for traceability and auctioning of shipping containers and cargo in maritime industry. IEEE Access 10:124507–124522. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3225000CrossRef

Feist J, Grieco G, Groce A (2019) Slither: A static analysis framework for smart contracts. In: 2019 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain (WETSEB), p 8–15 https://doi.org/10.1109/WETSEB.2019.00008

Frantz CK, Nowostawski M (2016) From institutions to code: Towards automated generation of smart contracts. In: 2016 IEEE 1st International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS*W), pp 210–215 https://doi.org/10.1109/FAS-W.2016.53

Gao Z, Jiang L, Xia X, Lo D, Grundy J (2020) Checking smart contracts with structural code embedding. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Ghaleb A, Pattabiraman K (2020) How effective are smart contract analysis tools? evaluating smart contract static analysis tools using bug injection. In: Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, ISSTA 2020, p 415-427 https://doi.org/10.1145/3395363.3397385

Grossman S, Abraham I, GolanGueta G, Michalevsky Y, Rinetzky N, Sagiv M, Zohar Y (2018) Online detection of effectively callback free objects with applications to smart contracts. CoRR arxiv:1801.04032

Harris ZS (1981) Distributional Structure, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht, pp 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8467-7-1

Hartigan JA, Wong MA (1979) Algorithm as 136: A k-means clustering algorithm. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 28(1):100–108MATH

He N, Wu L, Wang H, Guo Y, Jiang X (2019) Characterizing code clones in the ethereum smart contract ecosystem. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.00272

He X, Qin B, Zhu Y, Chen X, Liu Y (2018) Spesc: A specification language for smart contracts. In: IEEE 42nd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), vol 01, pp 132–137 https://doi.org/10.1109/COMPSAC.2018.00025

Huang Y, Chen X, Liu Z, Luo X, Zheng Z (2017a) Using discriminative feature in software entities for relevance identification of code changes. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process 29(7):e1859. https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.1859

Huang Y, Zheng Q, Chen X, Xiong Y, Liu Z, Luo X (2017b) Mining version control system for automatically generating commit comment. In: ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), pp 414–423 https://doi.org/10.1109/ESEM.2017.56

Huang Y, Jia N, Chen X, Hong K, Zheng Z (2018a) Salient-class location: Help developers understand code change in code review. In: Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ACM, New York, NY, USA, ESEC/FSE, pp 770–774 https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264841

Huang Y, Jia N, Zhou Q, Chen X, Xiong Y, Luo X (2018b) Guiding developers to make informative commenting decisions in source code. In: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings, ACM, New York, NY, USA, ICSE ’18, pp 260–261 https://doi.org/10.1145/3183440.3194960

Huang Y, Kong Q, Jia N, Chen X, Zheng Z (2019) Recommending differentiated code to support smart contract update. In: IEEE/ACM 27th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), pp 260–270 https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2019.00045

Jiang J, Xiong Y, Zhang H, Gao Q, Chen X (2018) Shaping program repair space with existing patches and similar code. In: Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ACM, New York, NY, USA, ISSTA, pp 298–309 https://doi.org/10.1145/3213846.3213871

Juels A, Kosba A, Shi E (2016) The ring of gyges: Investigating the future of criminal smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM, New York, NY, USA, CCS ’16, pp 283–295 https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978362

Kiffer L, Levin D, Mislove A (2018) Analyzing ethereum’s contract topology. In: Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference, pp 494–499

Kosba A, Miller A, Shi E, Wen Z, Papamanthou C (2016) Hawk: The blockchain model of cryptography and privacy-preserving smart contracts. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP), pp 839–858 https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2016.55

Le Q, Mikolov T (2014a) Distributed representations of sentences and documents. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on International Conference on Machine Learning, JMLR.org, ICML’14, vol 32 p II-1188-II-1196

Le Q, Mikolov T (2014b) Distributed representations of sentences and documents. In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on International Conference on Machine Learning, JMLR.org, ICML’14, vol 32 p II-1188-II-1196

Liu H, Yang Z, Liu C, Jiang Y, Zhao W, Sun J (2018) Eclone: Detect semantic clones in ethereum via symbolic transaction sketch. In: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, p 900–903

Liu H, Yang Z, Jiang Y, Zhao W, Sun J (2019) Enabling clone detection for ethereum via smart contract birthmarks. In: IEEE/ACM 27th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), IEEE, p 105–115

Luu L, Chu DH, Olickel H, Saxena P, Hobor A (2016) Making smart contracts smarter. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, ACM, New York, NY, USA, CCS ’16, p 254–269 https://doi.org/10.1145/2976749.2978309

Merkle RC (1980) Protocols for public key cryptosystems. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p 122–122 https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.1980.10006

Merlec MM, Lee YK, In HP (2021) Smartbuilder: A block-based visual programming framework for smart contract development. In: IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain), pp 90–94 https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain53845.2021.00023

Mikolov T, Sutskever I, Chen K, Corrado G, Dean J (2013) Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Curran Associates Inc., USA, NIPS’13, pp 3111–3119. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2999792.2999959

Mueller B (2018) Smashing ethereum smart contracts for fun and real profit. In: in 9th Annual HITB Security Conference (HITBSecConf), p 54

Nakamoto S (2009) Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Cryptography Mailing list at https://metzdowd.com

Nick S (2008) The idea of smart contracts (1997). http://www.fonhumuvanl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabobestvwhnet/idea.html

Norta A (2015) Creation of smart-contracting collaborations for decentralized autonomous organizations. Perspectives in Business Informatics Research. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 3–17CrossRef

Oliva J, Serrano JI, del Castillo MD, Iglesias Á (2011) Symss: A syntax-based measure for short-text semantic similarity. Data & Knowledge Engineering 70(4):390–405CrossRef

Ostrom E (1995) A grammar of institutions. American Political Science Review 89(3):582–600CrossRef

Parizi RM, Amritraj Dehghantanha A (2018) Smart contract programming languages on blockchains: An empirical evaluation of usability and security. Blockchain - ICBC 2018. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 75–91CrossRef

Ren M, Ma F, Yin Z, Fu Y, Li H, Chang W, Jiang Y (2021) Making smart contract development more secure and easier. In: Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, ESEC/FSE 2021, p 1360-1370 https://doi.org/10.1145/3468264.3473929

Roy CK, Cordy JR (2008a) Nicad: Accurate detection of near-miss intentional clones using flexible pretty-printing and code normalization. In: Proceedings of the 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, IEEE Computer Society, USA, ICPC ’08, p 172-181 https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2008.41

Roy CK, Cordy JR (2008b) Nicad: Accurate detection of near-miss intentional clones using flexible pretty-printing and code normalization. In: 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, p 172–181 https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2008.41

Roy CK, Cordy JR, Koschke R (2009) Comparison and evaluation of code clone detection techniques and tools: A qualitative approach. Sci Comput Program 74(7):470–495. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2009.02.007MathSciNetCrossRefMATH

Sapirshtein A, Sompolinsky Y, Zohar A (2017) Optimal selfish mining strategies in bitcoin. Christ Church, Barbados, vol 9603 LNCS, p 515–532

Swan M (2015) Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy, 1st edn. O’Reilly Media, Inc

Torres CF, Schütte J, State R (2018) Osiris: Hunting for integer bugs in ethereum smart contracts. In: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, ACSAC ’18, p 664-676 https://doi.org/10.1145/3274694.3274737

Wang B, Chen S, Yao L, Liu B, Xu X, Zhu L (2018) A simulation approach for studying behavior and quality of blockchain networks. Blockchain - ICBC 2018. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 18–31CrossRef

Wettel R, Marinescu R (2005) Archeology of code duplication: recovering duplication chains from small duplication fragments. In: Seventh International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC’05), p 8 https://doi.org/10.1109/SYNASC.2005.20

Yu L, Tsai W, Li G, Yao Y, Hu C, Deng E (2017) Smart-contract execution with concurrent block building. In: 2017 11th IEEE Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, pp 160–167 https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.33

Yue R, Gao Z, Meng N, Xiong Y, Wang X, Morgenthaler JD (2018) Automatic clone recommendation for refactoring based on the present and the past. In: IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), pp 115–126 https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2018.00021

Zheng P, Zheng Z, Luo X, Chen X, Liu X (2018) A detailed and real-time performance monitoring framework for blockchain systems. In: International Conference on Software Engineering Software Engineering in Practice - ICSE-SEIP ’18, p 134–143 https://doi.org/10.1145/3183519.3183546

Zheng Z, Xie S, Dai H, Chen X, Wang H (2017) An overview of blockchain technology: Architecture, consensus, and future trends. In: IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress), p 557–564 https://doi.org/10.1109/BigDataCongress.2017.85

Zhu J, He P, Fu Q, Zhang H, Lyu MR, Zhang D (2015) Learning to log: Helping developers make informed logging decisions. In: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, ICSE ’15, p 415–425. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2818754.2818807

Title: Studying differentiated code to support smart contract update
Authors: Xiangping Chen
Peiyong Liao
Queping Kong
Yuan Huang
Xiaocong Zhou
Publication date: 01-09-2023
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Empirical Software Engineering / Issue 5/2023
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10359-y

Springer Professional

Abstract

Please log in to get access to your license.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Other articles of this Issue 5/2023

A study of documentation for software architecture

XSnare: application-specific client-side cross-site scripting protection

An automated detection of confusing variable pairs with highly similar compound names in Java and Python programs

Responding to change over time: A longitudinal case study on changes in coordination mechanisms in large-scale agile

Tag that issue: applying API-domain labels in issue tracking systems

Investigating developers’ perception on software testability and its effects

Premium Partner