SEMar 25
Software Supply Chain Smells: Lightweight Analysis for Secure Dependency ManagementLarissa Schmid, Diogo Gaspar, Raphina Liu et al.
Modern software systems heavily rely on third-party dependencies, making software supply chain security a critical concern. We introduce the concept of software supply chain smells as structural indicators that signal potential security risks. We design and evaluate Dirty-Waters, a novel tool for detecting such smells in the supply chains of software packages. Through interviews with practitioners, we show that our proposed smells align with real-world concerns and capture signals considered valuable. A quantitative study of popular packages in the Maven and NPM ecosystems reveals that while smells are prevalent in both, they differ significantly across ecosystems, with traceability and signing issues dominating in Maven and most smells being rare in NPM, due to strong registry-level guarantees. Software supply chain smells support developers and organizations in making informed decisions and improving their software supply chain security posture.
CRNov 4, 2025
PoCo: Agentic Proof-of-Concept Exploit Generation for Smart ContractsVivi Andersson, Sofia Bobadilla, Harald Hobbelhagen et al.
Smart contracts operate in a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerabilities can lead to substantial financial losses. Thus, smart contracts are subject to security audits. In auditing, proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits play a critical role by demonstrating to the stakeholders that the reported vulnerabilities are genuine, reproducible, and actionable. However, manually creating PoCs is time-consuming, error-prone, and often constrained by tight audit schedules. We introduce POCO, an agentic framework that automatically generates executable PoC exploits from natural-language vulnerability descriptions written by auditors. POCO autonomously generates PoC exploits in an agentic manner by interacting with a set of code-execution tools in a Reason-Act-Observe loop. It produces fully executable exploits compatible with the Foundry testing framework, ready for integration into audit reports and other security tools. We evaluate POCO on a dataset of 23 real-world vulnerability reports. POCO consistently outperforms the prompting and workflow baselines, generating well-formed and logically correct PoCs. Our results demonstrate that agentic frameworks can significantly reduce the effort required for high-quality PoCs in smart contract audits. Our contribution provides readily actionable knowledge for the smart contract security community.
SEFeb 9, 2024
CigaR: Cost-efficient Program Repair with LLMsDávid Hidvégi, Khashayar Etemadi, Sofia Bobadilla et al.
Large language models (LLM) have proven to be effective at automated program repair (APR). However, using LLMs can be costly, with companies invoicing users by the number of tokens. In this paper, we propose CigaR, the first LLM-based APR tool that focuses on minimizing the repair cost. CigaR works in two major steps: generating a first plausible patch and multiplying plausible patches. CigaR optimizes the prompts and the prompt setting to maximize the information given to LLMs using the smallest possible number of tokens. Our experiments on 429 bugs from the widely used Defects4J and HumanEval-Java datasets shows that CigaR reduces the token cost by 73%. On average, CigaR spends 127k tokens per bug while the baseline uses 467k tokens per bug. On the subset of bugs that are fixed by both, CigaR spends 20k per bug while the baseline uses 608k tokens, a cost saving of 96%. Our extensive experiments show that CigaR is a cost-effective LLM-based program repair tool that uses a low number of tokens to automatically generate patches.
SEMar 25, 2024
DISL: Fueling Research with A Large Dataset of Solidity Smart ContractsGabriele Morello, Mojtaba Eshghie, Sofia Bobadilla et al.
The DISL dataset features a collection of $514,506$ unique Solidity files that have been deployed to Ethereum mainnet. It caters to the need for a large and diverse dataset of real-world smart contracts. DISL serves as a resource for developing machine learning systems and for benchmarking software engineering tools designed for smart contracts. By aggregating every verified smart contract from Etherscan up to January 15, 2024, DISL surpasses existing datasets in size and recency.