Research Pulse #51 is out!
In Dissimilar Redundancy in DeFi, authors evaluate major exploits in DeFi and hypothesize a new approach to mitigate the occurrence and the severity of such exploits. The authors call this Dissimilar Redundancy, a concept borrowed from avionics security. In the context of DeFi, it involves implementing the logic of a smart contract application multiple times, ideally using multiple programming languages. Once compiled, the resulting state transitions must match before the application is able to change its state.
In Smart Contract Security: a Practitioners’ Perspective, the authors provide an interesting survey of smart contract developers and attempt to identify industry best practices. A group of 13 interviewees was selected to conduct surveys on 156 respondents from 35 countries and identify commonalities in their development practices.
Finally, in Verifying Liquidity of Recursive Bitcoin Contracts, the authors present a tool that can be used to verify programs built with BitML, a novel stateless smart contract scheme previously covered on SCRF. This tool effectively verifies the liquidity of BitML smart contracts which, as the authors point out, enables a variety of interesting use cases.