An empirical study of attack-related events in DeFi projects development

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) offers users decentralized financial services that are associated with the security of their assets. If DeFi is attacked, it could lead to considerable losses. Unfortunately, there is a lack of research on how DeFi developers respond to attacks during the development process. This lack of knowledge makes it difficult to identify which attacks to protect against and to create a comprehensive attack response system. This paper presents an empirical study to understand the current state of developers’ response to attacks during the development process. In addition, we conduct an analytical framework to help developers take preventive measures against attacks. Our research has revealed that Overflow Attack-related events are the most frequent (63, 19.75% of all attack-related events), and high-value DeFi projects tend to have more feedback and active development activities. We have observed that most of the attack instances (61, 85.92%) do not have corresponding attack-related development events, which can lead to a lack of trust between project teams and users if it is unclear whether the team responds to attacks. Furthermore, we have noticed that after the resolution of the same attack-related event, some attacks may recur, even though they could have been prevented. Consequently, we suggest some future research directions and provide some advice for DeFi project developers.