Identifying Solidity Smart Contract API Documentation Errors

【Author】 Zhu, Chenguang; Liu, Ye; Wu, Xiuheng; Li, Yi

【Source】PROCEEDINGS OF THE 37TH IEEE/ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTOMATED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, ASE 2022

【影响因子】

【Abstract】Smart contracts are gaining popularity as a means to support transparent, traceable, and self-executing decentralized applications, which enable the exchange of value in a trustless environment. Developers of smart contracts rely on various libraries, such as OpenZeppelin for Solidity contracts, to improve application quality and reduce development costs. The API documentations of these libraries are important sources of information for developers who are unfamiliar with the APIs. Yet, maintaining high-quality documentations is non-trivial, and errors in documentations may place barriers for developers to learn the correct usages of APIs. In this paper, we propose a technique, DOCCON, to detect inconsistencies between documentations and the corresponding code for Solidity smart contract libraries. Our fact-based approach allows inconsistencies of different severity levels to be queried, from a database containing precomputed facts about the API code and documentations. DOCCON successfully detected high-priority API documentation errors in popular smart contract libraries, including mismatching parameters, missing requirements, outdated descriptions, etc. Our experiment result shows that DOCCON achieves good precision and is applicable to different libraries: 29 and 22 out of our reported 40 errors have been confirmed and fixed by library developers so far.

【Keywords】Smart contract; API documentation; program facts

【发表时间】2022

【收录时间】2023-10-14

【文献类型】实验仿真

【主题类别】

区块链治理-技术治理-智能合约漏洞检测