Characterizing Code Clones in the Ethereum Smart Contract Ecosystem.
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Presented at FinancialCryptographyandDataSecurity 2020 by
ct. In this paper, we present the first large-scale and systematic study to characterize the code reuse practice in the Ethereum smartcontract ecosystem. We first performed a detailed similarity comparisonstudy on a dataset of 10 million contracts we had harvested, and then wefurther conducted a qualitative analysis to characterize the diversity ofthe ecosystem, understand the correlation between code reuse and vulnerabilities, and detect the plagiarized DApps. Our analysis revealed thatover 96% of the contracts had duplicates, while a large number of themwere similar, which suggests that the ecosystem is highly homogeneous.Our results also suggested that roughly 9.7% of the similar contract pairshave exactly the same vulnerabilities, which we assume were introducedby code clones. In addition, we identified 41 DApps clusters, involving 73plagiarized DApps which had caused huge financial loss to the originalcreators, accounting for 1/3 of the original market volume.