A study on ĐApps characteristics

Repositories are important indicators for liveness and maturity in software development communities. They host user-facing applications or re-usable artefacts to build such applications. While rarely decentralised themselves, they are important for hosting code for decentralised applications. In this study, we investigate public repositories dedicated to decentralised applications, or DApps, -- executing on heterogeneous blockchain platforms. The study is the first to report aggregated metrics on the repository-level and application-level characteristics including -- DApps metadata, associated smart contracts composition and inconsistencies between repositories in both schema and content. The main contributions are data acquisition tools and an evolving public dataset along with an initial analysis to derive key metrics in a reproducible way. Insights provided encompass the dominance of Ethereum, the absence of smart contracts for a significant portion of applications, and unused application advertisement potential by absence from popular repositories. The insights can be exploited by developers to build high-quality and highly popular applications and set up corresponding quality checks

Detecting Blockchain Security Threats

In many organizations, permissioned blockchain networks are currently transitioning from a proof-of-concept stage to production use. A crucial part of this transition is ensuring awareness of potential threats to network operations. Due to the plethora of software components involved in distributed ledgers, threats may be difficult or impossible to detect without a structured monitoring approach. To this end, we conduct a survey of attacks on permissioned blockchains and develop a set of threat indicators. To gather these indicators, a data processing pipeline is proposed to aggregate log information from relevant blockchain components, enriched with data from external sources. To evaluate the feasibility of monitoring current blockchain frameworks, we determine relevant data sources in Hyperledger Fabric. Our results show that the required data is mostly available, but also highlight significant improvement potential with regard to threat intelligence, chaincode scanners and built-in metrics

Blockchain smart contracts: Applications, challenges, and future trends

In recent years, the rapid development of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies has influenced the financial industry by creating a new crypto-economy. Then, next-generation decentralized applications without involving a trusted third-party have emerged thanks to the appearance of smart contracts, which are computer protocols designed to facilitate, verify, and enforce automatically the negotiation and agreement among multiple untrustworthy parties. Despite the bright side of smart contracts, several concerns continue to undermine their adoption, such as security threats, vulnerabilities, and legal issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of blockchain-enabled smart contracts from both technical and usage points of view. To do so, we present a taxonomy of existing blockchain-enabled smart contract solutions, categorize the included research papers, and discuss the existing smart contract-based studies. Based on the findings from the survey, we identify a set of challenges and open issues that need to be addressed in future studies. Finally, we identify future trends