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Related papers: Mutation testing of smart contracts at scale

200 papers

Background: Test flakiness is identified as a major issue that compromises the regression testing process of complex software systems. Flaky tests manifest non-deterministic behaviour, send confusing signals to developers, and break their…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Sarra Habchi , Maxime Cordy , Mike Papadakis , Yves Le Traon

Smart contracts are computer programs that can be consistently executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the arbitration of a trusted authority. Because of their resilience to tampering, smart contracts are appealing in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-06-21 Massimo Bartoletti , Livio Pompianu

Mutation analysis measures test suite adequacy, the degree to which a test suite detects seeded faults: one test suite is better than another if it detects more mutants. Mutation analysis effectiveness rests on the assumption that mutants…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2016-11-09 Miltiadis Allamanis , Earl T. Barr , René Just , Charles Sutton

Smart contracts provide the means to stipulate rules of interaction between mutually distrustful organizations. They encode contractual agreements on the basis of source code, which else need to be contractualized in natural language. While…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2022-07-07 Tobias Eichinger , Marcel Ebermann

Quantum software testing has attracted interest in recent years, prompting the development of various techniques to automate the testing of quantum software. These techniques generate test cases that must be assessed for their effectiveness…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Eñaut Mendiluze Usandizaga , Thomas Laurent , Paolo Arcaini , Shaukat Ali

The state-of-the-practice in software development is driven by constant change fueled by continuous integration servers. Such constant change demands for frequent and fully automated tests capable to detect faults immediately upon project…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Ali Parsai , Serge Demeyer

The emergence of blockchain technology has revolutionized contract execution through the introduction of smart contracts. Ethereum, the leading blockchain platform, leverages smart contracts to power decentralized applications (DApps),…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Tahrim Hossain , Sakib Hassan , Faisal Haque Bappy , Muhammad Nur Yanhaona , Tarannum Shaila Zaman , Tariqul Islam

Recent years have seen an explosion of activity in Generative AI, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), revolutionising applications across various fields. Smart contract vulnerability detection is no exception; as smart contracts…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Peter Ince , Jiangshan Yu , Joseph K. Liu , Xiaoning Du

LLM-based mutation testing is a promising testing technology, but existing approaches typically rely on a fixed set of mutations as few-shot examples or none at all. This can result in generic low-quality mutations, missed context-specific…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Bo Wang , Ming Deng , Mingda Chen , Chengran Yang , Youfang Lin , Mark Harman , Mike Papadakis , Jie M. Zhang

The widespread recognition of the smart contracts has established their importance in the landscape of next generation blockchain technology. However, writing a correct smart contract is notoriously difficult. Moreover, once a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Xinming Wang , Zhijian Xie , Jiahao He , Gansen Zhao , Nie Ruihua

Smart contract, one of the most successful applications of blockchain, is taking the world by storm, playing an essential role in the blockchain ecosystem. However, frequent smart contract security incidents not only result in tremendous…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Peng Qian , Zhenguang Liu , Qinming He , Butian Huang , Duanzheng Tian , Xun Wang

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the opportunities, challenges, and potential solutions of harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to dig out vulnerabilities within smart contracts based on our ongoing research.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Sihao Hu , Tiansheng Huang , Fatih İlhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Ling Liu

Smart Contracts are programs running logic in the Blockchain network by executing operations through immutable transactions. The Blockchain network validates such transactions, storing them into sequential blocks of which integrity is…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Francesco Salzano , Simone Scalabrino , Rocco Oliveto , Remo Pareschi

With the frantic development of smart contracts on the Ethereum platform, its market value has also climbed. In 2016, people were shocked by the loss of nearly $50 million in cryptocurrencies from the DAO reentrancy attack. Due to the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-05-03 Xiaotao Feng , Qin Wang , Xiaogang Zhu , Sheng Wen

Deep learning (DL) defines a new data-driven programming paradigm where the internal system logic is largely shaped by the training data. The standard way of evaluating DL models is to examine their performance on a test dataset. The…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-08-16 Lei Ma , Fuyuan Zhang , Jiyuan Sun , Minhui Xue , Bo Li , Felix Juefei-Xu , Chao Xie , Li Li , Yang Liu , Jianjun Zhao , Yadong Wang

Security attacks targeting smart contracts have been on the rise, which have led to financial loss and erosion of trust. Therefore, it is important to enable developers to discover security vulnerabilities in smart contracts before…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Asem Ghaleb , Karthik Pattabiraman

Mutation testing is an effective but time consuming method for gauging the quality of a test suite. It functions by repeatedly making changes, called mutants, to the source code and checking whether the test suite fails (i.e., whether the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2018-09-13 Serena Chen

Modern blockchain systems support creation of smart contracts -- stateful programs hosted and executed on a blockchain. Smart contracts hold and transfer significant amounts of digital currency which makes them an attractive target for…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Dmitrii Suvorov , Vladimir Ulyantsev

When permutation methods are used in practice, often a limited number of random permutations are used to decrease the computational burden. However, most theoretical literature assumes that the whole permutation group is used, and methods…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-08-20 Jesse Hemerik , Jelle Goeman

Mutation analysis is one of the most effective, but costly means of assessing the ability of software test suites to prevent bugs. Traditional mutation analysis involves producing and evaluating syntactic variants of the original to check…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Rahul Gopinath , Philipp Goerz