Confessions of a smart contract paper reviewer

Summary: A Trail of Bits reviewer who has reviewed over 25 smart contract analysis papers across seven venues in the past year lists six requirements for a good paper, and says he would reject work whose method is unclear, whose authors did no homework beyond Ethereum's Wikipedia page, or whose experiments rest on 50 random contracts holding $0.05 of Ether and mostly duplicating each other. He also names weak comparisons to a single outdated academic tool while ignoring five popular open-source tools, and claims of superiority that rest on a generous notion of "bug" and more false positives.
What you should know: The reviewer's rejection bar is concrete: 50 contracts with 10 transactions each and $0.05 of Ether is the kind of test set that gets a smart contract analysis tool published, and it is the same evidence a security team might use to decide whether to trust that tool.

Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗