Defying the Odds: Solana's Unexpected Resilience in Spite of the Security Challenges Faced by Developers
arxiv(2024)
Abstract
Solana gained considerable attention as one of the most popular blockchain
platforms for deploying decentralized applications. Compared to Ethereum,
however, we observe a lack of research on how Solana smart contract developers
handle security, what challenges they encounter, and how this affects the
overall security of the ecosystem. To address this, we conducted the first
comprehensive study on the Solana platform consisting of a 90-minute Solana
smart contract code review task with 35 participants followed by interviews
with a subset of seven participants. Our study shows, quite alarmingly, that
none of the participants could detect all important security vulnerabilities in
a code review task and that 83
vulnerable smart contracts. Our study also sheds light on the root causes of
developers' challenges with Solana smart contract development, suggesting the
need for better security guidance and resources. In spite of these challenges,
our automated analysis on currently deployed Solana smart contracts
surprisingly suggests that the prevalence of vulnerabilities - especially those
pointed out as the most challenging in our developer study - is below 0.3
explore the causes of this counter-intuitive resilience and show that
frameworks, such as Anchor, are aiding Solana developers in deploying secure
contracts.
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