An Efficient Vulnerability Detection Model for Ethereum Smart Contracts

• Published in: Network and System Security Vol. 11928; pp. 433 - 442
• Main Authors: Song, Jingjing, He, Haiwu, Lv, Zhuo, Su, Chunhua, Xu, Guangquan, Wang, Wei
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2019; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Blockchain; Smart contracts; Vulnerability detection
• ISBN: 9783030369378; 3030369374
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-36938-5_26

Smart contracts are decentralized applications running on the blockchain to meet various practical scenario demands. The increasing number of security events regarding smart contracts have led to huge pecuniary losses and destroyed the ecological stability of contract layer on the blockchain. Faced with the increasing quantity of contracts, it is an emerging issue to effectively and efficiently detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Existing methods of detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts like Oyente mainly employ symbolic execution. This method is very time-consuming, as the symbolic execution requires the exploration of all executable paths in a contract. In this work, we propose an efficient model for the detection of vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts with machine learning techniques. The model is able to effectively and fast detect vulnerabilities based on the patterns learned from training samples. Our model is evaluated on 49502 real-world smart contracts and the results verify its effectiveness and efficiency.