SMARTEST: Effectively hunting vulnerable transaction sequences in smart contracts through language model-guided symbolic execution

Sunbeom So, Seongjoon Hong, Hakjoo Oh

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    70 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We present SMARTEST, a novel symbolic execution technique for effectively hunting vulnerable transaction sequences in smart contracts. Because smart contracts are stateful programs whose states are altered by transactions, diagnosing and understanding nontrivial vulnerabilities requires generating sequences of transactions that demonstrate the flaws. However, finding such vulnerable transaction sequences is challenging as the number of possible combinations of transactions is intractably large. As a result, most existing tools for smart contract analysis use abstractions and merely point out the locations of vulnerabilities, which in turn imposes a steep burden on users of understanding the bugs, or have limited power in generating transaction sequences. In this paper, we aim to overcome this challenge by combining symbolic execution with a language model for vulnerable transaction sequences, so that symbolic execution effectively prioritizes program paths that are likely to reveal vulnerabilities. Experimental results with real-world smart contracts show that SMARTEST significantly outperforms existing tools by finding more vulnerable transaction sequences including critical zero-day vulnerabilities.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium
    PublisherUSENIX Association
    Pages1361-1378
    Number of pages18
    ISBN (Electronic)9781939133243
    Publication statusPublished - 2021
    Event30th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2021 - Virtual, Online
    Duration: 2021 Aug 112021 Aug 13

    Publication series

    NameProceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium

    Conference

    Conference30th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2021
    CityVirtual, Online
    Period21/8/1121/8/13

    Bibliographical note

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2021 by The USENIX Association. All rights reserved.

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Computer Networks and Communications
    • Information Systems
    • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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