The Ethereum Defect Ontology represents a curated knowledge base of defects for Ethereum and its smart coontracts. At the moment, it contains 135 defects encompassing vulnerabilities and code flaws affecting the Ethereum ecosystem. Defects are grouped following a hierarchical category system, to highlight similarities for a better understanding of defect root causes and mitigation strategies.
More details on the category system, and the ontology in general, can be found in the paper:
An Ontology of Defects for Ethereum and its Smart Contracts
Michele Pasqua, Sofia Mari, Ferdinando Santoro, and Mariano Ceccato
Blockchain: Research and Applications (2025), 100418, ISSN 2096-7209
DOI: 10.1016/j.bcra.2025.100418
The ontology (the file etherem-defect-ontology.rdf in the root of this repository) is encoded in the RDF Format and thus easily extensible.
To graphically access the ontology, you can use the Ethereum Defect Ontology Visualizer tool EDOV, which also provides query functionalities on the ontology.
The tool is an early-stage prototype, and can be found in the edov folder of this repository. Details on how to use the tool are reported in the edov/README.md file.
We plan to provide a public web-based access to the tool soon!