Smart Contract Security: Evaluating Efficiency and Performance of Preventing Re-entrancy Attacks

This paper provides a deep overview of popular smart contract protection mechanisms used in blockchain technology against re-entry attacks. The conducted analysis of research has shown quite convincingly that this type of attack is the most significant among others and is the subject of most scientific work and preventive measures. This is a very clear indication of the relevance of this topic in the field of digital security, and more precisely in the field of blockchain transaction security. T o increase the practical significance of this work, performance tests were also performed on the basic smart contracts, which were protected by various methods. The methodology for assessing the performance of smart contracts in the Ethereum system (decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality) is determined by gas costs. This is the only one main metric for assessing the performance of smart contracts (for example, when transferring funds from one account to another). This approach, together with comparative characteristics of protective mechanisms, should provide a deep understanding to developers of smart contracts that are aimed at ensuring the performance and security of the systems being developed. The work may be useful to other researchers, as well as anyone interested in blockchain technologies, to improve their understanding of modern smart contract security systems and methods for evaluating their performance. The source code for all implementations, analyses, and experiments described in this thesis is available at the author's public repository on GitHub (Pakhomovskii, 2024).