Smart Contract Security: A Practitioners' Perspective: The Artifact of a Paper Accepted in the 43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021)

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, we wondered how software practitioners build security into smart contracts in practice. We 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. Our study uncovers practitioners' motivations and deterrents of smart contract security, as well as how security efforts and strategies fit into the development lifecycle. We also find that blockchain platforms have astatistically significant impact on practitioners' security perceptions and practices of smart contract development. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions and provide recommendations for practitioners.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger that provides an open, decentralized, and fault-tolerant transaction mechanism. Blockchain technology has attracted considerable attention from both industry and academia since it is originally introduced for Bitcoin [7] to support the exchange of cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology evolves to facilitate general-purpose computations with a wide range of decentralized applications. The Smart contract technology is one appealing decentralized application that enables the computations on top of a blockchain.