English

STAN: Towards Describing Bytecodes of Smart Contract

Software Engineering 2020-07-21 v1 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

More than eight million smart contracts have been deployed into Ethereum, which is the most popular blockchain that supports smart contract. However, less than 1% of deployed smart contracts are open-source, and it is difficult for users to understand the functionality and internal mechanism of those closed-source contracts. Although a few decompilers for smart contracts have been recently proposed, it is still not easy for users to grasp the semantic information of the contract, not to mention the potential misleading due to decompilation errors. In this paper, we propose the first system named STAN to generate descriptions for the bytecodes of smart contracts to help users comprehend them. In particular, for each interface in a smart contract, STAN can generate four categories of descriptions, including functionality description, usage description, behavior description, and payment description, by leveraging symbolic execution and NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques. Extensive experiments show that STAN can generate adequate, accurate, and readable descriptions for contract's bytecodes, which have practical value for users.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.09696,
  title  = {STAN: Towards Describing Bytecodes of Smart Contract},
  author = {Xiaoqi Li and Ting Chen and Xiapu Luo and Tao Zhang and Le Yu and Zhou Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.09696},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

In Proc. of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS), 2020

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:13:42.504Z