Immutable in Principle, Upgradeable by Design: Exploratory Study of Smart Contract Upgradeability

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01493v1
• Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2024 17:35:37 GMT
• Title: Immutable in Principle, Upgradeable by Design: Exploratory Study of Smart Contract Upgradeability
• Authors: Ilham Qasse, Mohammad Hamdaqa, Björn Þór Jónsson,
• Abstract summary: This study identifies upgradeable contracts and examines their upgrade history to uncover trends, preferences, and challenges associated with modifications. The evidence from analyzing over 44 million contracts shows that only 3% have upgradeable characteristics, with only 0.34% undergoing upgrades. The relationship between upgrades and user activity is complex, suggesting that additional factors significantly affect the use of smart contracts beyond their evolution.
• Score: 0.717789756063617
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Smart contracts, known for their immutable nature to ensure trust via automated enforcement, have evolved to require upgradeability due to unforeseen vulnerabilities and the need for feature enhancements post-deployment. This contradiction between immutability and the need for modifications has led to the development of upgradeable smart contracts. These contracts are immutable in principle yet upgradable by design, allowing updates without altering the underlying data or state, thus preserving the contract's intent while allowing improvements. This study aims to understand the application and implications of upgradeable smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. By introducing a dataset that catalogs the versions and evolutionary trajectories of smart contracts, the research explores key dimensions: the prevalence and adoption patterns of upgrade mechanisms, the likelihood and occurrences of contract upgrades, the nature of modifications post-upgrade, and their impact on user engagement and contract activity. Through empirical analysis, this study identifies upgradeable contracts and examines their upgrade history to uncover trends, preferences, and challenges associated with modifications. The evidence from analyzing over 44 million contracts shows that only 3% have upgradeable characteristics, with only 0.34% undergoing upgrades. This finding underscores a cautious approach by developers towards modifications, possibly due to the complexity of upgrade processes or a preference for maintaining stability. Furthermore, the study shows that upgrades are mainly aimed at feature enhancement and vulnerability mitigation, particularly when the contracts' source codes are accessible. However, the relationship between upgrades and user activity is complex, suggesting that additional factors significantly affect the use of smart contracts beyond their evolution.

Related papers

• FlexiContracts: A Novel and Efficient Scheme for Upgrading Smart Contracts in Ethereum Blockchain [0.16752458252726457]
  FlexiContracts reimagines the evolution of smart contracts by enabling secure, in-place upgrades without losing historical data. Its streamlined design transcends the limitations of current design patterns by simplifying smart contract development. This advancement fosters an environment for continuous improvement and adaptation to new requirements.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-15T02:20:42Z)
• Bridging Immutability with Flexibility: A Scheme for Secure and Efficient Smart Contract Upgrades [0.1759252234439348]
  FlexiContracts+ reimagines smart contracts by enabling secure, in-place upgrades while preserving historical data. We show that FlexiContracts+ achieves a practical balance between immutability and flexibility, advancing the capabilities of smart contract systems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-13T16:59:28Z)
• The Myth of Immutability: A Multivocal Review on Smart Contract Upgradeability [0.6124448703245243]
  immutability of smart contracts on blockchain platforms like promotes security and trustworthiness but presents challenges for updates, bug fixes, or adding new features post-deployment. Despite various upgrade mechanisms proposed in academic research and industry, a comprehensive analysis of their trade-offs and practical implications is lacking. This study aims to systematically identify, classify, and evaluate existing smart contract upgrade mechanisms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-03T16:02:46Z)
• Versioned Analysis of Software Quality Indicators and Self-admitted Technical Debt in Ethereum Smart Contracts with Ethstractor [2.052808596154225]
  This paper proposes Ethstractor, the first smart contract collection tool for gathering a dataset of versioned smart contracts. The collected dataset is then used to evaluate the reliability of code metrics as indicators of vulnerabilities in smart contracts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-22T18:27:29Z)
• The Feasibility of a Smart Contract "Kill Switch" [0.9696996416317306]
  We examine the existing mechanisms for smart contract termination across several major blockchain platforms. We assess the compatibility of these mechanisms with the requirements of the EU Data Act. We discuss the challenges associated with implementing the so-called smart contract "kill switches"
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-14T19:31:15Z)
• Demystifying the Characteristics for Smart Contract Upgrades [16.242723608028573]
  We conduct an empirical study on proxy-based upgradable smart contracts to understand the characteristics of contract upgrading. We found that 583 contracts have ever been upgraded on functionality, involving 973 unique contract versions. The results demonstrate that there are 4,334 ABI breaking changes due to the upgrades of 276 proxies, causing real-world broken usages within 584 transactions witnessed by the blockchain.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-09T10:09:49Z)
• Gradual Verification for Smart Contracts [0.4543820534430522]
  Algos facilitate secure resource transactions through smart contracts, yet these digital agreements are prone to vulnerabilities. Traditional verification techniques fall short in providing comprehensive security assurances. This paper introduces an incremental approach: gradual verification.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-22T12:42:26Z)
• CONTRACTFIX: A Framework for Automatically Fixing Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts [12.68736241704817]
  ContractFix is a framework that automatically generates security patches for vulnerable smart contracts. Users can use it as a security fix-it tool that automatically applies patches and verifies the patched contracts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-18T01:14:31Z)
• Formally Verifying a Real World Smart Contract [52.30656867727018]
  We search for a tool capable of formally verifying a real-world smart contract written in a recent version of Solidity. In this article, we present our search for a tool capable of formally verifying a real-world smart contract written in a recent version of Solidity.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-07-05T14:30:21Z)
• Enhancing Multiple Reliability Measures via Nuisance-extended Information Bottleneck [77.37409441129995]
  In practical scenarios where training data is limited, many predictive signals in the data can be rather from some biases in data acquisition. We consider an adversarial threat model under a mutual information constraint to cover a wider class of perturbations in training. We propose an autoencoder-based training to implement the objective, as well as practical encoder designs to facilitate the proposed hybrid discriminative-generative training.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-03-24T16:03:21Z)
• Semantic Information Marketing in The Metaverse: A Learning-Based Contract Theory Framework [68.8725783112254]
  We address the problem of designing incentive mechanisms by a virtual service provider (VSP) to hire sensing IoT devices to sell their sensing data. Due to the limited bandwidth, we propose to use semantic extraction algorithms to reduce the delivered data by the sensing IoT devices. We propose a novel iterative contract design and use a new variant of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to solve the modelled multi-dimensional contract problem.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-02-22T15:52:37Z)
• RoFL: Attestable Robustness for Secure Federated Learning [59.63865074749391]
  Federated Learning allows a large number of clients to train a joint model without the need to share their private data. To ensure the confidentiality of the client updates, Federated Learning systems employ secure aggregation. We present RoFL, a secure Federated Learning system that improves robustness against malicious clients.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-07-07T15:42:49Z)
• ESCORT: Ethereum Smart COntRacTs Vulnerability Detection using Deep Neural Network and Transfer Learning [80.85273827468063]
  Existing machine learning-based vulnerability detection methods are limited and only inspect whether the smart contract is vulnerable. We propose ESCORT, the first Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based vulnerability detection framework for smart contracts. We show that ESCORT achieves an average F1-score of 95% on six vulnerability types and the detection time is 0.02 seconds per contract.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-03-23T15:04:44Z)
• Trustworthy AI [75.99046162669997]
  Brittleness to minor adversarial changes in the input data, ability to explain the decisions, address the bias in their training data, are some of the most prominent limitations. We propose the tutorial on Trustworthy AI to address six critical issues in enhancing user and public trust in AI systems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-11-02T20:04:18Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.