Truffle tests for free -- Replaying Ethereum smart contracts for transparency
This work addresses transparency issues for users and developers of Ethereum smart contracts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing replay techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of smart contract transparency by developing ContractVis, a tool that replays historic transactions in a minimal test environment, resulting in five concrete recommendations for blockchain explorers to improve transparency.
The Ethereum blockchain is essentially a globally replicated public database. Programs called smart contracts can access this database. Over 10 million smart contracts have been deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. Executing a method of a smart contract generates a transaction that is also stored on the blockchain. There are over 1 billion Ethereum transactions to date. Smart contracts that are transparent about their function are more successful than opaque contracts. We have therefore developed a tool (ContractVis) to explore the transparency of smart contracts. The tool generates a replay script for the historic transactions of a smart contract. The script executes the transactions with the same arguments as recorded on the blockchain, but in a minimal test environment. Running a replay script provides insights into the contract, and insights into the blockchain explorer that was used to retrieve the contract and its history. We provide five concrete recommendations for blockchain explorers like Etherscan to improve the transparency of smart contracts.