Unveiling the Landscape of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: A Detailed Examination and Codification of Vulnerabilities in Prominent Blockchains

Abstract: With the rise in using immature smart contract programming languages to build a decentralized application, more vulnerabilities have been introduced to the Blockchain and were the main reasons behind critical financial losses. Moreover, the immutability of Blockchain technology makes deployed smart contracts unfixable for the whole life of the Blockchain itself. The lack of complete and up-to-date resources that explain those vulnerabilities in detail has also contributed to increasing the number of vulnerabilities in Blockchain. In addition, the lack of a standardized nomination of the existing vulnerabilities has made redundant research and made developers more confused. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the most complete list of smart contract vulnerabilities that exist in the most popular Blockchains with a detailed explanation of each one of them. In addition, we propose a new codification system that facilitates the communication of those vulnerabilities between developers and researchers. This codification, help identify the most uncovered vulnerabilities to focus on in future research. Moreover, the discussed list of vulnerabilities covers multiple Blockchain and could be used for even future built Blockchains.