OWASP 2026 Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: Access Control (SC01:2026) Analysis

Access control failures represent the highest-severity class of smart contract vulnerabilities in the OWASP 2026 Top 10 list. These vulnerabilities occur when authentication and authorization mechanisms fail to properly restrict what users or roles can do within a contract, leading to unauthorized state changes, fund theft, or protocol manipulation. Unlike traditional web application security where access control failures often affect user privacy, access control failures in smart contracts dire