Fujitsu Develops Technology to Detect Ethereum Smart Contract Risks

Ethereum unlocked the true potential of blockchain technology by introducing smart contracts in 2014. However, the nascent technology is struggling with many technical flaws. In a bid to overcome the risks associated with smart contracts, the Japanese IT giant Fujitsu has announced that it has developed a technology that can verify the risks in advance.

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The statement released by Fujitsu explained: “Because smart contracts are copied to multiple locations and executed in a distributed manner, once a contract has been executed, it cannot easily be stopped, and it cannot be revised even if risks are found in the smart contract. In fact, there has been an incident in which, because a smart contract to create an automatic investment trust application on a blockchain was flawed, a huge amount of capital was improperly transferred.”

Fujitsu’s two wings – Fujitsu Laboratories and Fujitsu Research and Development Center – worked together to develop algorithms to identify risk-affected transaction sequences on Ethereum.

According to Fujitsu, there are “six types of risks in smart contracts which have the potential to be overlooked in a manual review, and can then identify the relevant locations in the source code”.

Fujitsu claims that its new technology will not only detect the risks but will also accurately identify their locations in the source code.

In addition, the technology is capable of detecting 100% of risks. As for precision, the company claims that the technology is 88% accurate, in terms of risk detection and source code risk location identification.

“Because over-identification of risk is rare, this technology will enable more efficient smart contract development, and combined with the risk location identification technology, it is also expected to reduce the workload involved in tasks such as specification comprehension, code evaluation, and fixing the code. This technology will contribute to the efficient application of blockchain technology to a wide variety of fields,” the statement added.

Fujitsu is one of the major tech firms that are actively involved with blockchain technology. It is a member of a consortium which is developing the blockchain framework – Hyperledger Fabric. The firm also confirmed that it will continue its work on blockchain technology for building secure systems.