Zeke Xiao

ZeKe Xiao, Qin Wang, Hammond Pearce et al.

Smart contract vulnerabilities caused significant economic losses in blockchain applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide new possibilities for addressing this time-consuming task. However, state-of-the-art LLM-based detection solutions are often plagued by high false-positive rates. In this paper, we push the boundaries of existing research in two key ways. First, our evaluation is based on Solidity v0.8, offering the most up-to-date insights compared to prior studies that focus on older versions (v0.4). Second, we leverage the latest five LLM models (across companies), ensuring comprehensive coverage across the most advanced capabilities in the field. We conducted a series of rigorous evaluations. Our experiments demonstrate that a well-designed prompt can reduce the false-positive rate by over 60%. Surprisingly, we also discovered that the recall rate for detecting some specific vulnerabilities in Solidity v0.8 has dropped to just 13% compared to earlier versions (i.e., v0.4). Further analysis reveals the root cause of this decline: the reliance of LLMs on identifying changes in newly introduced libraries and frameworks during detection.

Zeke Xiao, Yuekang Li, Qin Wang et al.

We explore the feasibility of using LLMs for Automated Exploit Generation (AEG) against vulnerable smart contracts. We present \textsc{ReX}, a framework integrating LLM-based exploit synthesis with the Foundry testing suite, enabling the automated generation and validation of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits. We evaluate five state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Opus 4, DeepSeek, and Qwen3 Plus) on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world smart contracts affected by known high-impact exploits. Our results show that modern LLMs can reliably generate functional PoC exploits for diverse vulnerability types, with success rates reaching up to 92\%. Notably, Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-4.1 consistently outperform others in both synthetic and real-world scenarios. We further analyze factors influencing AEG effectiveness, including model capabilities, contract structure, and vulnerability types. We also collect the first curated dataset of real-world PoC exploits to support future research.