International Journal of Computer Networks and Applications (IJCNA)

Published By EverScience Publications

ISSN : 2395-0455

MENU
International Journal of Computer Networks and Applications (IJCNA)

International Journal of Computer Networks and Applications (IJCNA)

Published By EverScience Publications

ISSN : 2395-0455

An Empirical Review on Blockchain Smart Contracts: Application and Challenges in Implementation

Author NameAuthor Details

Jasvant Mandloi, Pratosh Bansal

Jasvant Mandloi[1]

Pratosh Bansal[2]

[1]Department of Information Technology, Institute of Engineering and Technology, Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore, India

[2]Department of Information Technology, Institute of Engineering and Technology, Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore, India

Cite this Article

DOI: 10.22247/ijcna/2020/195718

Pages : 43 - 61

 Download PDF

9992

Views

Abstract

This paper focuses on an extensive review of Blockchain Smart contract applications in real-world scenarios and challenges in it. As in today's world, Blockchain has got tremendous importance in different types of services, so it will be beneficial to analyze the loopholes in the cybersecurity aspect as well as other technical issues in privacy and governance. A smart contract is the software code that comprises a self-executed set of rules and regulations that runs on Blockchain. To implement various real-world services over different decentralized platforms, a lot of research work is going on. In this paper, a detailed review is done on more than 100 latest published documents based on the Blockchain Smart contract and applications. By following the systematic mapping research methodology first, we have identified paper relevant to our research domain, and then by applying various filters, we extracted relevant information. At last, the article highlighted the challenges and research gaps that have to be addressed in the future.

Index Terms

Smart Contracts

Blockchain

Consensus

IoT

Bitcoins

Cryptocurrency

Reference

  1. 1.
    T. ODEJOBI, "CSC626-LectureNote," 13 April 2012. [Online]. Available: ifecisrg.org/sites/default/files/csc626-LectureNote.pdf. [Accessed Oct,12, 2018].
  2. 2.
    D. Yaga, P. Mell, N. Roby, and K. Scarfone, "Blockchain technology overview," NIST Interagency/Internal Rep., p. 57, 2018, doi: 10.6028/NIST.IR.8202.
  3. 3.
    J. Yli-Huumo, D. Ko, S. Choi, S. Park, and K. Smolander, "Where is current research on Blockchain technology? - A systematic review," PLoS One, vol. 11, no. 10, pp. 1-27, 2016, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0163477.
  4. 4.
    "Global market for blockchain technology 2018-2023 | Statista." https://www.statista.com/statistics/647231/worldwide-blockchain-technology-market-size/ (accessed Oct. 15, 2018).
  5. 5.
    N. . Satoshi, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," , . [Online]. Available: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. [accessed 28 12 2018].
  6. 6.
    Z. Zheng, S. Xie, H. Dai, X. Chen, and H. Wang, "An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends," Proc. - 2017 IEEE 6th Int. Congr. Big Data, BigData Congr. 2017, pp. 557-564, 2017, doi: 10.1109/BigDataCongress.2017.85.
  7. 7.
    M. Alharby and A. Van Moorsel, "BlockSim: A simulation framework for blockchain systems," Perform. Eval. Rev., vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 135-138, 2019, doi: 10.1145/3308897.3308956.
  8. 8.
    A. Bahga and V. K. Madisetti, "Blockchain Platform for Industrial Internet of Things," J. Softw. Eng. Appl., vol. 09, no. 10, pp. 533-546, 2016, doi: 10.4236/jsea.2016.910036.
  9. 9.
    O. Dib, K.-L. Brousmiche, A. Durand, E. Thea, and B. Hamida, "Consortium Blockchains: Overview, Applications and Challenges," Int. J. Adv. Telecommun., vol. 11, no. 1&2, pp. 51-64, 2018.
  10. 10.
    B. K. Mohanta and D. Jena, "An Overview of Smart Contract and Use Cases in Blockchain Technology: 2018 9th International Conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT)," 2018 9th Int. Conf. Comput. Commun. Netw. Technol., pp. 1-4, 2018, doi: 10.1109/ICCCNT.2018.8494045.
  11. 11.
    M. H. Miraz and M. Ali, "Applications of Blockchain Technology beyond Cryptocurrency," 2018. accessed: Oct-20-2019. [Online]. Available: www.aetic.theiaer.org.
  12. 12.
    N. Szabo, "Formalizing and securing relationships on public networks," First Monday, 1997. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548 (accessed Dec. 27, 2018).
  13. 13.
    E. Regnath and S. Steinhorst, "SmaCoNat: Smart Contracts in Natural Language," Forum Specif. Des. Lang., vol. 2018-Septe, no. September, 2018, doi: 10.1109/FDL.2018.8524068.
  14. 14.
    S. Tikhomirov, "s-tikhomirov/smart-contract-languages", GitHub, 2018. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/s-tikhomirov/smart-contract-languages. [Accessed: 10- Dec- 2018].
  15. 15.
    R. Hanifatunnisa and B. Rahardjo, "Blockchain based e-voting recording system design," Proceeding 2017 11th Int. Conf. Telecommun. Syst. Serv. Appl. TSSA 2017, vol. 2018-Janua, pp. 1-6, 2018, doi: 10.1109/TSSA.2017.8272896.
  16. 16.
    R. Hanifatunnisa and B. Rahardjo, "Blockchain based e-voting recording system design," Proceeding 2017 11th Int. Conf. Telecommun. Syst. Serv. Appl. TSSA 2017, vol. 2018-Janua, pp. 1-6, 2018, doi: 10.1109/TSSA.2017.8272896.
  17. 17.
    J. Moubarak, E. Filiol, and M. Chamoun, "On blockchain security and relevant attacks," in IEEE Middle East and North Africa Communications Conference, MENACOMM, 2018, pp. 1-6. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1109/MENACOMM.2018.8371010
  18. 18.
    R. M. Parizi, Amritraj, and A. Dehghantanha, "Smart contract programming languages on blockchains: An empirical evaluation of usability and security," Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. (including Subser. Lect. Notes Artif. Intell. Lect. Notes Bioinformatics), vol. 10974 LNCS, no. June, pp. 75-91, 2018, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-94478-4_6.
  19. 19.
    G. Destefanis, M. Marchesi, M. Ortu, R. Tonelli, A. Bracciali, and R. Hierons, "Smart contracts vulnerabilities: A call for blockchain software engineering?," 2018 IEEE 1st Int. Work. Blockchain Oriented Softw. Eng. IWBOSE 2018 - Proc., vol. 2018-Janua, pp. 19-25, 2018, doi: 10.1109/IWBOSE.2018.8327567.
  20. 20.
    N. Atzei, M. Bartoletti, and T. Cimoli, "A survey of attacks on Ethereum smart contracts (SoK)", Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. (including Subser. Lect. Notes Artif. Intell. Lect. Notes Bioinformatics), vol. 10204 LNCS, no. July, pp. 164-186, 2017, doi: 10.1007/978-3-662-54455-6_8.
  21. 21.
    A. Murali, "Most government blockchain projects in India are stuck at the starting blocks," 2018.https://factordaily.com/india-government-blockchain-projects/ (accessed Dec. 17, 2018).
  22. 22.
    S. Keele, "Guidelines for performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering," Technical report, Ver. 2.3 EBSE Technical Report. EBSE, 2007. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302924724_Guidelines_for_performing_Systematic_Literature_Reviews_in_Software_Engineering (accessed Apr. 20, 2019).
  23. 23.
    W. Chen, Z. Xu, S. Shi, Y. Zhao, and J. Zhao, "A survey of blockchain applications in different domains," ACM Int. Conf. Proceeding Ser., pp. 17-21, 2018, doi: 10.1145/3301403.3301407.
  24. 24.
    F. R. Batubara, J. Ubacht, and M. Janssen, "Challenges of blockchain technology adoption for e-government," Proc. 19th Annu. Int. Conf. Digit. Gov. Res. Gov. Data Age - dgo '18, pp. 1-9, 2018, doi: 10.1145/3209281.3209317.
  25. 25.
    S. Rouhani and R. Deters, "Security, performance, and applications of smart contracts: A systematic survey," IEEE Access, vol. 7, no. c, pp. 50759-50779, 2019, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2911031.
  26. 26.
    J. Al-Jaroodi and N. Mohamed, "Blockchain in Industries: A Survey," IEEE Access, vol. 7, no. c, pp. 36500-36515, 2019, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2903554.
  27. 27.
    A. Prashanth Joshi, M. Han, and Y. Wang, "A survey on security and privacy issues of blockchain technology," Math. Found. Comput., vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 121-147, 2018, doi: 10.3934/mfc.2018007.
  28. 28.
    S. Chen, R. Shi, Z. Ren, J. Yan, Y. Shi, and J. Zhang, "A Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Quality Management Framework," Proc. - 14th IEEE Int. Conf. E-bus. Eng. ICEBE 2017 - Incl. 13th Work. Serv. Appl. Integr. Collab. SOAIC 207, pp. 172-176, 2017, doi: 10.1109/ICEBE.2017.34.
  29. 29.
    P. McCorry, S. F. Shahandashti, and F. Hao, "A smart contract for boardroom voting with maximum voter privacy," Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. (including Subser. Lect. Notes Artif. Intell. Lect. Notes Bioinformatics), vol. 10322 LNCS, pp. 357-375, 2017, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-70972-7_20.
  30. 30.
    A. Hughes, A. Park, J. Kietzmann, and C. Archer-Brown, "Beyond Bitcoin: What blockchain and distributed ledger technologies mean for firms," Bus. Horiz., vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 273-281, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.bushor.2019.01.002.
  31. 31.
    T. M. Fernandez-Carames and P. Fraga-Lamas, "A Review on the Application of Blockchain to the Next Generation of Cybersecure Industry 4.0 Smart Factories," IEEE Access, vol. 7, no. c, pp. 45201-45218, 2019, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2908780.
  32. 32.
    S. Wang, L. Ouyang, Y. Yuan, X. Ni, X. Han, and F. Y. Wang, "Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contracts: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends," IEEE Trans. Syst. Man, Cybern. Syst., vol. 49, no. 11, pp. 2266-2277, 2019, doi: 10.1109/TSMC.2019.2895123.
  33. 33.
    R. C. De Souza, E. M. Luciano, and G. C. Wiedenhoft, "The uses of the Blockchain Smart Contracts reduce the levels of corruption: Some preliminary thoughts," ACM Int. Conf. Proceeding Ser., pp. 5-6, 2018, doi: 10.1145/3209281.3209408.
  34. 34.
    C. Udokwu, A. Kormiltsyn, K. Thangalimodzi, and A. Norta, "An Exploration of Blockchain enabled Smart-Contracts Application in the Enterprise," no. June, pp. 1-28, 2018, doi: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36464.97287.
  35. 35.
    F. Casino, T. K. Dasaklis, and C. Patsakis, "A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues," Telemat. Informatics, vol. 36, pp. 55-81, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.tele.2018.11.006.
  36. 36.
    A. Ramachandran and D. M. Kantarcioglu, "Using Blockchain and smart contracts for secure data provenance management," 2017, [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10000.
  37. 37.
    V. Gatteschi, F. Lamberti, C. Demartini, C. Pranteda, and V. Santamaria, "To Blockchain or Not to Blockchain: That Is the Question," IT Prof., vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 62-74, 2018, doi: 10.1109/MITP.2018.021921652.
  38. 38.
    G. Greenspan, "The Blockchain Immutability Myth - CoinDesk." https://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-immutability-myth/ (accessed Dec. 16, 2018).
  39. 39.
    V. Lemieux, "Blockchain for Recordkeeping: Help or Hype?," 2016. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309414363_Blockchain_for_Recordkeeping_Help_or_Hype (accessed Dec. 27, 2019).
  40. 40.
    R. Henry, A. Herzberg, and A. Kate, "Blockchain access privacy: Challenges and directions," IEEE Secur. Priv., vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 38-45, 2018, doi: 10.1109/MSP.2018.3111245.
  41. 41.
    Y. Hu, M. Liyanage, A. Mansoor, K. Thilakarathna, G. Jourjon, and A. Seneviratne, "Blockchain-based Smart Contracts - Applications and Challenges," vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-12, 2018, [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04699.
  42. 42.
    Q. Feng, D. He, S. Zeadally, M. K. Khan, and N. Kumar, "A survey on privacy protection in blockchain system," J. Netw. Comput. Appl., vol. 126, pp. 45-58, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.jnca.2018.10.020.
  43. 43.
    J. Buck, "Blockchain Oracles, Explained | Cointelegraph," Cointelegraph, 2017. https://cointelegraph.com/explained/blockchain-oracles-explained (accessed Dec. 15, 2019).
  44. 44.
    L. Luu, D. H. Chu, H. Olickel, P. Saxena, and A. Hobor, "Making smart contracts smarter," in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2016, vol. 24-28-October-2016, pp. 254-269, doi: 10.1145/2976749.2978309..
  45. 45.
    A. Juels, A. Kosba, and E. Shi, "The ring of gyges: Investigating the future of criminal smart contracts," Proc. ACM Conf. Comput. Commun. Secur., vol. 24-28-Octo, pp. 283-295, 2016, doi: 10.1145/2976749.2978362.
  46. 46.
    X. Li, P. Jiang, T. Chen, X. Luo, and Q. Wen, "A survey on the security of blockchain systems," Futur. Gener. Comput. Syst., vol. 107, no. Xiaoqi Li, pp. 841-853, 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.future.2017.08.020.
  47. 47.
    H. Mayer, "ECDSA Security in Bitcoin and Ethereum: a Research Survey," 2016.https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1785/6bad4335c8ca7419aab2c715ea25ce5e0621.pdf(accessed Dec, 18,2018)
  48. 48.
    T. Chen, X. Li, X. Luo, and X. Zhang, "Under-optimized smart contracts devour your money," SANER 2017 - 24th IEEE Int. Conf. Softw. Anal. Evol. Reengineering, pp. 442-446, 2017, doi: 10.1109/SANER.2017.7884650.
  49. 49.
    M. Apostolaki, A. Zohar, and L. Vanbever, "Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies," Proc. - IEEE Symp. Secur. Priv., pp. 375-392, 2017, doi: 10.1109/SP.2017.29.
  50. 50.
    L. Luu et al., "SmartPool : Practical Decentralized Pooled Mining This paper is included in the Proceedings of the," Proc. 26Th Usenix Secur. Symp. (Usenix Secur. '17), pp. 1409-1426, 2017.
  51. 51.
    A. Kosba, A. Miller, E. Shi, Z. Wen, and C. Papamanthou, "Hawk: The Blockchain Model of Cryptography and Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts," Proc. - 2016 IEEE Symp. Secur. Privacy, SP 2016, pp. 839-858, 2016, doi: 10.1109/SP.2016.55.
  52. 52.
    P. J. Taylor, T. Dargahi, A. Dehghantanha, R. M. Parizi, and K. K. R. Choo, "A systematic literature review of blockchain cyber security," Digit. Commun. Networks, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.dcan.2019.01.005.
  53. 53.
    C. Liu, H. Liu, Z. Cao, Z. Chen, B. Chen, and B. Roscoe, "ReGuard: Finding reentrancy bugs in smart contracts," Proc. - Int. Conf. Softw. Eng., pp. 65-68, 2018, doi: 10.1145/3183440.3183495.
  54. 54.
    K. Yamashita, Y. Nomura, E. Zhou, B. Pi, and S. Jun, "Potential Risks of Hyperledger Fabric Smart Contracts," IWBOSE 2019 - 2019 IEEE 2nd Int. Work. Blockchain Oriented Softw. Eng., pp. 1-10, 2019, doi: 10.1109/IWBOSE.2019.8666486.
  55. 55.
    D. L. Hofman, "Legally speaking: Smart contracts, archival bonds, and linked data in the blockchain," 2017 26th Int. Conf. Comput. Commun. Networks, ICCCN 2017, pp. 0-3, 2017, doi: 10.1109/ICCCN.2017.8038515.
  56. 56.
    A. Savelyev, "Copyright in the blockchain era: Promises and challenges," Comput. Law Secur. Rev., vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 550-561, 2018, doi: 10.1016/j.clsr.2017.11.008.
  57. 57.
    P. Chakraborty, R. Shahriyar, A. Iqbal, and A. Bosu, "Understanding the software development practices of blockchain projects: A survey," Int. Symp. Empir. Softw. Eng. Meas., 2018, doi: 10.1145/3239235.3240298.
  58. 58.
    J. Angelis and E. Ribeiro da Silva, "Blockchain adoption: A value driver perspective," Bus. Horiz., vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 307-314, 2019, doi: 10.1016/j.bushor.2018.12.001.
  59. 59.
    NEO, "NEO Smart Economy," Www.Neo.Org, 2014. https://neo.org/ (accessed Dec. 19, 2019).
  60. 60.
    E. Androulaki et al., "Hyperledger Fabric: A Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains," Proc. 13th EuroSys Conf. EuroSys 2018, vol. 2018-January, pp. 1-15, 2018, doi: 10.1145/3190508.3190538.
  61. 61.
    R. G. Brown, "The Corda Platform: An Introduction," 2018. Accessed: 16-Nov-2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.corda.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/corda-platform-whitepaper.pdf.
  62. 62.
    D. Mazi`eres "Stellar Consensus Protocol - Stellar." https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol (accessed Dec. 27, 2019).
  63. 63.
    EOS.IO, "Documentation/TechnicalWhitePaper.md at master . EOSIO/Documentation . GitHub," Github.com, 2018. https://github.com/EOSIO/Documentation/blob/master/TechnicalWhitePaper.md (accessed Nov 27, 2019).
  64. 64.
    T. Bocek and B. Stiller, "Smart contracts - Blockchains in thewings," in Digital Marketplaces Unleashed, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2017, pp. 169-184.
  65. 65.
    Z. Zheng et al., "An overview on smart contracts: Challenges, advances and platforms," Futur. Gener. Comput. Syst., vol. 105, pp. 475-491, 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.future.2019.12.019.
  66. 66.
    T. C. Le, L. Xu, L. Chen, and W. Shi, "Proving conditional termination for smart contracts," in BCC 2018 - Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Blockchains, Cryptocurrencies, and Contracts, Co-located with ASIA CCS 2018, 2018, pp. 57-59, doi: 10.1145/3205230.3205239.
  67. 67.
    C. F. Torres, J. Schutte, and R. State, "Osiris: Hunting for integer bugs in ethereum smart contracts," in ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, 2018, pp. 664-676, doi: 10.1145/3274694.3274737.
  68. 68.
    Y. Hirai, "Bamboo: a language for morphing smart contracts", 2018, https://github.com/pirapira/bamboo, (accessed June 30, 2018).
  69. 69.
    P. Tsankov, A. Dan, D. Drachsler-Cohen, A. Gervais, F. Bunzli, and M. Vechev, "Securify: Practical security analysis of smart contracts," Proc. ACM Conf. Comput. Commun. Secur., no. June, pp. 67-82, 2018, doi: 10.1145/3243734.3243780.
  70. 70.
    W. Wirachantika, A. M. Barmawi, and B. A. Wahyudi, "Strengthening fawkescoin against double spending attack using Merkle tree," ACM Int. Conf. Proceeding Ser., pp. 49-54, 2019, doi: 10.1145/3309074.3309105.
  71. 71.
    D. Huang, C. J. Chung, Q. Dong, J. Luo, and M. Kang, "Building private blockchains over public blockchains (POP): An attribute-based access control approach," in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2019, vol. Part F147772, pp. 355-363, doi: 10.1145/3297280.3297317.
SCOPUS
SCImago Journal & Country Rank

Announcements

Archives

Downloads

Contact Us

Dr.M. Milton Joe
EverScience Publications,
Nagercoil, Tamilnadu,India

Talk to Us

+91 9442777224

Email Us

editor@ijcna.org

info@ijcna.org

info@everscience.org

Quick Links

Follow Us

Copyright © 2023; EverScience Publications

Designed & Maintained By Shiro Software Solutions