CRNov 24, 2021
xFuzz: Machine Learning Guided Cross-Contract FuzzingYinxing Xue, Jiaming Ye, Wei Zhang et al.
Smart contract transactions are increasingly interleaved by cross-contract calls. While many tools have been developed to identify a common set of vulnerabilities, the cross-contract vulnerability is overlooked by existing tools. Cross-contract vulnerabilities are exploitable bugs that manifest in the presence of more than two interacting contracts. Existing methods are however limited to analyze a maximum of two contracts at the same time. Detecting cross-contract vulnerabilities is highly non-trivial. With multiple interacting contracts, the search space is much larger than that of a single contract. To address this problem, we present xFuzz, a machine learning guided smart contract fuzzing framework. The machine learning models are trained with novel features (e.g., word vectors and instructions) and are used to filter likely benign program paths. Comparing with existing static tools, machine learning model is proven to be more robust, avoiding directly adopting manually-defined rules in specific tools. We compare xFuzz with three state-of-the-art tools on 7,391 contracts. xFuzz detects 18 exploitable cross-contract vulnerabilities, of which 15 vulnerabilities are exposed for the first time. Furthermore, our approach is shown to be efficient in detecting non-cross-contract vulnerabilities as well -- using less than 20% time as that of other fuzzing tools, xFuzz detects twice as many vulnerabilities.
SEDec 10, 2019
Vulpedia: Detecting Vulnerable Ethereum Smart Contracts via Abstracted Vulnerability SignaturesJiaming Ye, Mingliang Ma, Yun Lin et al.
Recent years have seen smart contracts are getting increasingly popular in building trustworthy decentralized applications. Previous research has proposed static and dynamic techniques to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts. These tools check vulnerable contracts against several predefined rules. However, the emerging new vulnerable types and programming skills to prevent possible vulnerabilities emerging lead to a large number of false positive and false negative reports of tools. To address this, we propose Vulpedia, which mines expressive vulnerability signatures from contracts. Vulpedia is based on the relaxed assumption that the owner of contract is not malicious. Specifically, we extract structural program features from vulnerable and benign contracts as vulnerability signatures, and construct a systematic detection method based on detection rules composed of vulnerability signatures. Compared with the rules defined by state-of-the-arts, our approach can extract more expressive rules to achieve better completeness (i.e., detection recall) and soundness (i.e., precision). We further evaluate Vulpedia with four baselines (i.e., Slither, Securify, SmartCheck and Oyente) on the testing dataset consisting of 17,770 contracts. The experiment results show that Vulpedia achieves best performance of precision on 4 types of vulnerabilities and leading recall on 3 types of vulnerabilities meanwhile exhibiting the great efficiency performance.