Smarter Contracts – Vulnerability Detection using Deep Neural Networks

Smart Contracts are computer programs that execute on a blockchain. The nature of blockchains allows one to run Smart Contracts in a trustless and decentralized environment. In this project, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Deep Neural Networks in the domain of Smart Contract vulnerability detection.

Smart Contracts are computer programs that execute on a blockchain. The nature of blockchains allows one to run Smart Contracts in a trustless and decentralized environment. While different projects implement the concept of Smart Contracts, we concentrate on EVM-based blockchains and use Ethereum as our primary example, as it is the most popular, adopted, and advanced implementation.

At first glance, those Smart Contracts seem rather abstract – code running in a VM on a blockchain. However, they provide the underlying technology in a vast and fast-growing ecosystem of NFTs, decentralized applications, and – of course – CryptoKitties. All of those systems have an invested interest of million and even billion dollars. Ethereum itself has a market cap of over 250 billion USD. Furthermore, all of those systems use the fundamental promise of trustless execution, where no trusted 3rd parties are needed to establish trust between two strangers on the Internet.

The goal of this project is to demonstrate the effectiveness of Deep Neural Networks in the domain of Smart Contract vulnerability detection. Specifically, we propose to use Transfer Learning to enable the extensibility of our Machine Learning model in regards to vulnerability classes. Moreover, we show the clear benefit of Transfer Learning by successfully classifying even underrepresented vulnerability classes.

You can find more information about this project and publications on this website.

People involved: Prof. A. Dmitrienko, Christoph Sendner

Publications

2023[ to top ]

Smarter Contracts: Detecting Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts with Deep Transfer Learning. Sendner, Christoph; Chen, Huili; Fereidooni, Hossein; Petzi, Lukas; König, Jan; Stang, Jasper; Dmitrienko, Alexandra; Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza; Koushanfar, Farinaz; in Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) (2023).
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@article{sendner2023smarter, author = {Sendner, Christoph and Chen, Huili and Fereidooni, Hossein and Petzi, Lukas and König, Jan and Stang, Jasper and Dmitrienko, Alexandra and Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza and Koushanfar, Farinaz}, journal = {Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)}, keywords = {lukaspetzi}, title = {Smarter Contracts: Detecting Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts with Deep Transfer Learning}, year = 2023 }
G-Scan: Graph Neural Networks for Line-Level Vulnerability Identification in Smart Contracts. Sendner, Christoph; Zhang, Ruisi; Hefter, Alexander; Dmitrienko, Alexandra; Koushanfar, Farinaz; in arXiv:2307.08549 (2023).
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@article{sendner2023gscan, author = {Sendner, Christoph and Zhang, Ruisi and Hefter, Alexander and Dmitrienko, Alexandra and Koushanfar, Farinaz}, journal = {arXiv:2307.08549}, keywords = {sss-group}, title = {G-Scan: Graph Neural Networks for Line-Level Vulnerability Identification in Smart Contracts}, year = 2023 }

2021[ to top ]

ESCORT: Ethereum Smart COntRacTs Vulnerability Detection using Deep Neural Network and Transfer Learning. Lutz, Oliver; Chen, Huili; Fereidooni, Hossein; Sendner, Christoph; Dmitrienko, Alexandra; Sadeghi, Ahmad Reza; Koushanfar, Farinaz; in ArXiv | arXiv:2103.12607v1 (2021).
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Ethereum smart contracts are automated decentralized applications on the blockchain that describe the terms of the agreement between buyers and sellers, reducing the need for trusted intermediaries and arbitration. However, the deployment of smart contracts introduces new attack vectors into the cryptocurrency systems. In particular, programming flaws in smart contracts can be and have already been exploited to gain enormous financial profits. It is thus an emerging yet crucial issue to detect vulnerabilities of different classes in contracts in an efficient manner. Existing machine learning-based vulnerability detection methods are limited and only inspect whether the smart contract is vulnerable, or train individual classifiers for each specific vulnerability, or demonstrate multi-class vulnerability detection without extensibility consideration. To overcome the scalability and generalization limitations of existing works, we propose ESCORT, the first Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based vulnerability detection framework for Ethereum smart contracts that support lightweight transfer learning on unseen security vulnerabilities, thus is extensible and generalizable. ESCORT leverages a multi-output NN architecture that consists of two parts: (i) A common feature extractor that learns the semantics of the input contract; (ii) Multiple branch structures where each branch learns a specific vulnerability type based on features obtained from the feature extractor. Experimental results show that ESCORT achieves an average F1-score of 95% on six vulnerability types and the detection time is 0.02 seconds per contract. When extended to new vulnerability types, ESCORT yields an average F1-score of 93%. To the best of our knowledge, ESCORT is the first framework that enables transfer learning on new vulnerability types with minimal modification of the DNN model architecture and re-training overhead.

@article{lutz2021escort, abstract = {Ethereum smart contracts are automated decentralized applications on the blockchain that describe the terms of the agreement between buyers and sellers, reducing the need for trusted intermediaries and arbitration. However, the deployment of smart contracts introduces new attack vectors into the cryptocurrency systems. In particular, programming flaws in smart contracts can be and have already been exploited to gain enormous financial profits. It is thus an emerging yet crucial issue to detect vulnerabilities of different classes in contracts in an efficient manner. Existing machine learning-based vulnerability detection methods are limited and only inspect whether the smart contract is vulnerable, or train individual classifiers for each specific vulnerability, or demonstrate multi-class vulnerability detection without extensibility consideration. To overcome the scalability and generalization limitations of existing works, we propose ESCORT, the first Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based vulnerability detection framework for Ethereum smart contracts that support lightweight transfer learning on unseen security vulnerabilities, thus is extensible and generalizable. ESCORT leverages a multi-output NN architecture that consists of two parts: (i) A common feature extractor that learns the semantics of the input contract; (ii) Multiple branch structures where each branch learns a specific vulnerability type based on features obtained from the feature extractor. Experimental results show that ESCORT achieves an average F1-score of 95% on six vulnerability types and the detection time is 0.02 seconds per contract. When extended to new vulnerability types, ESCORT yields an average F1-score of 93%. To the best of our knowledge, ESCORT is the first framework that enables transfer learning on new vulnerability types with minimal modification of the DNN model architecture and re-training overhead.}, author = {Lutz, Oliver and Chen, Huili and Fereidooni, Hossein and Sendner, Christoph and Dmitrienko, Alexandra and Sadeghi, Ahmad Reza and Koushanfar, Farinaz}, journal = {ArXiv | arXiv:2103.12607v1}, keywords = {cryptography}, month = {03}, title = {ESCORT: Ethereum Smart COntRacTs Vulnerability Detection using Deep Neural Network and Transfer Learning}, year = 2021 }

2020[ to top ]

Testbed for Security Testing of Smart Contracts. Denk, Lukas; Thesis; Bachelor Thesis. (2020, November).
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Ethereum, one of the most popular decentralized blockchain-based platforms [1], manages cryptocurrency worth more than 40 billion US Dollars [2]. A lot of the money is controlled by autonomous programs, so called smart contracts. They are executed on the platform and everyone can call their functions; vulnerabilities are therefore easily exploited. The immutable nature of the blockchain sharpens the problem even further by prohibiting belated bug fixes. In fact, there were several cases where attackers were able to steal cryptocurrency worth several millions of US Dollar [3]. This emphasises the need of soundly testing a smart contract before deployment. Unfortunately, existing security analysing tools each cover a different subsets of vulnerabilities [4]. Moreover, even when they test for the same security issues, they often find different results. A solid test run should therefore contain several tools, which makes the whole procedure very laborious. For these reasons, we provide a testbed which runs on a virtual machine (VM) with several smart contract security analysing tools integrated. It does not only offer a command line- but also an intuitive web interface. Both interfaces allow the user to analyse his contract with all the underlying tools in a single step. Additionally, our testbed provides a detailed report for each of the tools’ test runs as well as an overview of the overall security issues the different tools found. Our evaluation shows that our testbed identifies significantly more potential security issues than each of the compared smart contract analysing tools individually does. Indeed, we found 92% of our analysed contracts as potentially being vulnerable, while even the most sensitive tool only flagged 76% of its successfully analysed contracts. Furthermore, we observed that occasionally, two tools testing for the same vulnerability, contradict themselves in more than 81% of the contracts successfully analysed by both tools

@mastersthesis{denk2020testbed, abstract = {Ethereum, one of the most popular decentralized blockchain-based platforms [1], manages cryptocurrency worth more than 40 billion US Dollars [2]. A lot of the money is controlled by autonomous programs, so called smart contracts. They are executed on the platform and everyone can call their functions; vulnerabilities are therefore easily exploited. The immutable nature of the blockchain sharpens the problem even further by prohibiting belated bug fixes. In fact, there were several cases where attackers were able to steal cryptocurrency worth several millions of US Dollar [3]. This emphasises the need of soundly testing a smart contract before deployment. Unfortunately, existing security analysing tools each cover a different subsets of vulnerabilities [4]. Moreover, even when they test for the same security issues, they often find different results. A solid test run should therefore contain several tools, which makes the whole procedure very laborious. For these reasons, we provide a testbed which runs on a virtual machine (VM) with several smart contract security analysing tools integrated. It does not only offer a command line- but also an intuitive web interface. Both interfaces allow the user to analyse his contract with all the underlying tools in a single step. Additionally, our testbed provides a detailed report for each of the tools’ test runs as well as an overview of the overall security issues the different tools found. Our evaluation shows that our testbed identifies significantly more potential security issues than each of the compared smart contract analysing tools individually does. Indeed, we found 92% of our analysed contracts as potentially being vulnerable, while even the most sensitive tool only flagged 76% of its successfully analysed contracts. Furthermore, we observed that occasionally, two tools testing for the same vulnerability, contradict themselves in more than 81% of the contracts successfully analysed by both tools}, author = {Denk, Lukas}, keywords = {secure}, month = 11, publisher = {Bachelor Thesis}, school = {University of Würzburg}, title = {Testbed for Security Testing of Smart Contracts}, type = {Bachelor Thesis}, year = 2020 }
Detection of Software Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts using Deep Learning. Lutz, Oliver; Thesis; Master Thesis. (2020, October).
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Der Missbrauch von Programmierfehlern in Kryptowährungsplattformen kann zu großen wirtschaftlichen Schäden fuhren. Deshalb wird in dieser Arbeit analysiert, wie Deep-Learning genutzt werden kann, um Schwachstellen in Ethereum Smart Contracts aufzudecken. Als Ergebnis ist ein Framework entwickelt worden, das sich um die Datengewinnung, Vorklassifizierung und Modellbildung kummert. Mit diesem Framework können Deep-Learning-Modelle entwickelt, trainiert und evaluiert werden, um einen KI-Scanner zu erstellen. Selbst bei einfachen neuronalen Netz-Architekturen erreicht der KI-Scanner, der acht verschiedene Arten von Schwachstellen erkennen kann, eine Genauigkeit von 98%. Dieser KI-Scanner kann zur weiteren Verwendung eingesetzt werden. Er kann jedoch auch um Schwachstellentypen erweitert werden, um ein noch mächtigeres Tool zu bilden.

@mastersthesis{lutz2020detection, abstract = {Der Missbrauch von Programmierfehlern in Kryptowährungsplattformen kann zu großen wirtschaftlichen Schäden fuhren. Deshalb wird in dieser Arbeit analysiert, wie Deep-Learning genutzt werden kann, um Schwachstellen in Ethereum Smart Contracts aufzudecken. Als Ergebnis ist ein Framework entwickelt worden, das sich um die Datengewinnung, Vorklassifizierung und Modellbildung kummert. Mit diesem Framework können Deep-Learning-Modelle entwickelt, trainiert und evaluiert werden, um einen KI-Scanner zu erstellen. Selbst bei einfachen neuronalen Netz-Architekturen erreicht der KI-Scanner, der acht verschiedene Arten von Schwachstellen erkennen kann, eine Genauigkeit von 98%. Dieser KI-Scanner kann zur weiteren Verwendung eingesetzt werden. Er kann jedoch auch um Schwachstellentypen erweitert werden, um ein noch mächtigeres Tool zu bilden.}, author = {Lutz, Oliver}, keywords = {Private_AI}, month = 10, publisher = {Master Thesis}, school = {University of Würzburg}, title = {Detection of Software Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts using Deep Learning}, type = {Master Thesis}, year = 2020 }

Hubland Süd, Geb. M2

Smarter Contracts – Vulnerability Detection using Deep Neural Networks

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