Classification of Smart Contract Bugs Using the NIST Bugs Framework

Abstract

Blockchain technology has recently emerged as the primary platform for the transfer of digital currency. This technology, which has been heralded as a revolutionary tool to facilitate the transfer of funds between participating parties, is still in its infancy and should be subjected to thorough scrutiny. In recent years, researchers have attempted to uncover a litany of bugs embedded within these distributed systems; however, there does not yet exist a formal and standardized method for their classification. In this paper, we present the first formal classifications of known bugs in smart contract systems using NIST's Bugs Framework and propose two new classes: Distributed System Protocol (DSP) and Distributed System Resource Management (DRM).