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The Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for a vulnerability is crucial in validating its existence, mitigating false positives, and illustrating the severity of the security threat it poses. However, research on PoCs significantly lags behind studies…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Wenjing Dang , Kaixuan Li , Sen Chen , Zhenwei Zhuo , Lyuye Zhang , Zheli Liu

Ethereum smart contracts are executable programs, deployed on a peer-to-peer network and executed in a consensus-based fashion. Their bytecode is public, immutable and once deployed to the blockchain, cannot be patched anymore. As smart…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Konrad Weiss , Julian Schütte

Decentralized finance (DeFi) in Ethereum is a financial ecosystem built on the blockchain that has locked over 200 billion USD until April 2022. All transaction information is transparent and open when transacting through the DeFi protocol,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Wenkai Li , Jiuyang Bu , Xiaoqi Li , Xianyi Chen

Smart contracts play a central role in blockchain systems by encoding financial and operational logic. Still, their susceptibility to subtle security flaws poses significant risks of financial loss and erosion of trust. LLMs create new…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Eduardo Sardenberg , Antonio José Grandson Busson , Daniel de Sousa Moraes , Julio Cesar Duarte , Sérgio Colcher

Smart contracts are programs that execute transactions involving independent parties and cryptocurrencies. As programs, smart contracts are susceptible to a wide range of errors and vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities can result in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Sundas Munir , Walid Taha

In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of smart contract upgradability patterns using proxies. A primary characteristic of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain is that they are immutable once implemented, no changes can be…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Sajad Meisami , William Edward Bodell

Permissionless blockchains allow the execution of arbitrary programs (called smart contracts), enabling mutually untrusted entities to interact without relying on trusted third parties. Despite their potential, repeated security concerns…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-08-27 Petar Tsankov , Andrei Dan , Dana Drachsler Cohen , Arthur Gervais , Florian Buenzli , Martin Vechev

Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs), leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts, have emerged in decentralized finance. However, the DEX project with multi-contract interaction is accompanied by complex state logic, which makes it…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Zongwei Li , Wenkai Li , Xiaoqi Li , Yuqing Zhang

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has turned blockchains into financial infrastructure, allowing anyone to trade, lend, and build protocols without intermediaries, but this openness exposes pools of value controlled by code. Within five years,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Ziyue Wang , Jiangshan Yu , Kaihua Qin , Dawn Song , Arthur Gervais , Liyi Zhou

Smart Contracts (SCs) are programs stored in a Blockchain to ensure agreements between two or more parties. Due to the unchangeable essence of Blockchain, failures or errors in SCs become perpetual once published. The reliability of SCs is…

Smart contracts are frequently vulnerable to control-flow attacks based on confused deputies, reentrancy, and incorrect error handling. These attacks exploit the complexity of interactions among multiple possibly unknown contracts. Existing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Siqiu Yao , Haobin Ni , Stephanie Ma , Noah Schiff , Andrew C. Myers , Ethan Cecchetti

We introduce the Clockwork Finance Framework (CFF), a general purpose, formal verification framework for mechanized reasoning about the economic security properties of composed decentralized-finance (DeFi) smart contracts. CFF features…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Kushal Babel , Philip Daian , Mahimna Kelkar , Ari Juels

Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Zishuo Zhao , Zhixuan Fang , Xuechao Wang , Xi Chen , Hongxu Su , Haibo Xiao , Yuan Zhou

Smart contracts are prone to various vulnerabilities, leading to substantial financial losses over time. Current analysis tools mainly target vulnerabilities with fixed control or data-flow patterns, such as re-entrancy and integer…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Yuqiang Sun , Daoyuan Wu , Yue Xue , Han Liu , Haijun Wang , Zhengzi Xu , Xiaofei Xie , Yang Liu

At present, millions of Ethereum smart contracts are created per year and attract financially motivated attackers. However, existing analyzers do not meet the need to precisely analyze the financial security of large numbers of contracts.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Wansen Wang , Wenchao Huang , Zhaoyi Meng , Yan Xiong , Fuyou Miao , Xianjin Fang , Caichang Tu , Renjie Ji

Decentralized finance (DeFi) has become one of the most successful applications of blockchain and smart contracts. The DeFi ecosystem enables a wide range of crypto-financial activities, while the underlying smart contracts often contain…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Palina Tolmach , Yi Li , Shang-Wei Lin , Yang Liu

Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sen Yang , Aviv Yaish , Arthur Gervais , Fan Zhang

The proposed smart contract can prevent seven cyber attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man in the Middle Attack (MITM), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), 51\%, Injection attacks, Routing Attack, and Eclipse attack. The Delegated…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Amrutanshu Panigrahi , Ajit Kumar Nayak , Rourab Paul

As blockchain ecosystems grow, financially motivated attackers increasingly exploit decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, causing frequent and severe losses. Unlike conventional cyberattacks, DeFi exploits propagate rapidly due to the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Bowen Cai , Weiheng Bai , Youshui Lu , Haoran Xu , Yuannan Yang , Yajin Zhou , Kangjie Lu

Smart contracts enable users to execute payments depending on complex program logic. Ethereum is the most notable example of a blockchain that supports smart contracts leveraged for countless applications including games, auctions and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Tommaso Frassetto , Patrick Jauernig , David Koisser , David Kretzler , Benjamin Schlosser , Sebastian Faust , Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi