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Modern blockchain, such as Ethereum, supports the deployment and execution of so-called smart contracts, autonomous digital programs with significant value of cryptocurrency. Executing smart contracts requires gas costs paid by users, which…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Majd Soud , Waltteri Nuutinen , Grischa Liebel

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a system of financial products and services built and delivered through smart contracts on various blockchains. In the past year, DeFi has gained popularity and market capitalization. However, it has also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Arianna Trozze , Bennett Kleinberg , Toby Davies

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are crypto projects developed on the blockchain to manage digital assets. Attacks on DeFi have been frequent and have resulted in losses exceeding $80 billion. Current tools detect and locate possible…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Xiaoqi Li , Wenkai Li , Zhiquan Liu , Yuqing Zhang , Yingjie Mao

Billions of dollars are transacted through smart contracts, making vulnerabilities a major financial risk. One focus in the security arms race is on profitable vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Fuzzing is a key method for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Ziqiao Kong , Cen Zhang , Maoyi Xie , Ming Hu , Yue Xue , Ye Liu , Haijun Wang , Yang Liu

Auto-completing code enables developers to speed up coding significantly. Recent advances in transformer-based large language model (LLM) technologies have been applied to code synthesis. However, studies show that many of such synthesized…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-09 André Storhaug , Jingyue Li , Tianyuan Hu

Smart contract vulnerabilities can cause substantial financial losses due to the immutability of code after deployment. While existing tools detect vulnerabilities, they cannot effectively repair them. In this paper, we propose SCPatcher, a…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Xiaoqi Li , Shipeng Ye , Wenkai Li , Zongwei Li

While recent approaches leverage large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent pipelines to automatically generate proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits from vulnerability reports, existing systems often suffer from two fundamental limitations:…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Phan The Duy , Khoa Ngo-Khanh , Nguyen Huu Quyen , Van-Hau Pham

Power Side-Channel (PSC) attacks exploit power consumption patterns to extract sensitive information, posing risks to cryptographic operations crucial for secure systems. Traditional countermeasures, such as masking, face challenges…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Amisha Srivastava , Samit S. Miftah , Hyunmin Kim , Debjit Pal , Kanad Basu

Reentrancy vulnerability as one of the most notorious vulnerabilities, has been a prominent topic in smart contract security research. Research shows that existing vulnerability detection presents a range of challenges, especially as smart…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Zexu Wang , Jiachi Chen , Yanlin Wang , Yu Zhang , Weizhe Zhang , Zibin Zheng

Reentrancy attacks remain a persistent threat to decentralized applications (DApps), with malicious actors siphoning around 80M USD from the DApp ecosystem last year by exploiting EVM's inter-contract message-passing semantics. Existing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Shashank Joshi , Wojciech Golab

A widespread belief in the blockchain security community is that automated techniques are only good for detecting shallow bugs, typically of small value. In this paper, we present the techniques and insights that have led us to repeatable…

Upgradable smart contracts play an important role in the decentralized application ecosystem, to support routine maintenance, security patching, and feature additions. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on proxy-based upgradable…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ye Liu , Shuo Li , Xiuheng Wu , Yi Li , Zhiyang Chen , David Lo

Symbolic analysis of security exploits in smart contracts has demonstrated to be valuable for analyzing predefined vulnerability properties. While some symbolic tools perform complex analysis steps, they require a predetermined invocation…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Wesley Joon-Wie Tann , Xing Jie Han , Sourav Sen Gupta , Yew-Soon Ong

In decentralized finance (DeFi), lenders can offer flash loans to borrowers, i.e., loans that are only valid within a blockchain transaction and must be repaid with fees by the end of that transaction. Unlike normal loans, flash loans allow…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Zhiyang Chen , Sidi Mohamed Beillahi , Fan Long

Smart contract vulnerabilities, particularly improper Access Control that allows unauthorized execution of restricted functions, have caused billions of dollars in losses. GitHub hosts numerous smart contract repositories containing source…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Chong Chen , Jiachi Chen , Lingfeng Bao , David Lo , Yanlin Wang , Zhenyu Shan , Ting Chen , Guangqiang Yin , Jianxing Yu , Zibin Zheng

Smart contracts are self-executing programs on blockchain platforms like Ethereum, which have revolutionized decentralized finance by enabling trustless transactions and the operation of decentralized applications. Despite their potential,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Gerardo Iuliano , Dario Di Nucci

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have brought remarkable progress in code understanding and reasoning, creating new opportunities and raising new concerns for software security. Among many downstream tasks, generating…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Mengyao Zhao , Kaixuan Li , Lyuye Zhang , Wenjing Dang , Chenggong Ding , Sen Chen , Zheli Liu

Decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols are crypto projects developed on the blockchain to manage digital assets. Attacks on DeFi have been frequent and have resulted in losses exceeding \$77 billion. However, detection methods for malicious…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Wenkai Li , Xiaoqi Li , Yuqing Zhang , Zongwei Li

Scam contracts on Ethereum have rapidly evolved alongside the rise of DeFi and NFT ecosystems, utilizing increasingly complex code obfuscation techniques to avoid early detection. This paper systematically investigates how obfuscation…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Zhang Sheng , Tan Kia Quang , Shen Wang , Shengchen Duan , Kai Li , Yue Duan

This paper introduces a method for detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts using static analysis and a multi-objective optimization algorithm. We focus on four types of vulnerabilities: reentrancy, call stack overflow, integer…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Dongcheng Li , W. Eric Wong , Xiaodan Wang , Sean Pan , Liang-Seng Koh