research-article

How effective are smart contract analysis tools? evaluating smart contract static analysis tools using bug injection

Authors:

Karthik PattabiramanAuthors Info & Claims

ISSTA 2020: Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Pages 415 - 427

https://doi.org/10.1145/3395363.3397385

Published: 18 July 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Security attacks targeting smart contracts have been on the rise, which have led to financial loss and erosion of trust. Therefore, it is important to enable developers to discover security vulnerabilities in smart contracts before deployment. A number of static analysis tools have been developed for finding security bugs in smart contracts. However, despite the numerous bug-finding tools, there is no systematic approach to evaluate the proposed tools and gauge their effectiveness. This paper proposes SolidiFI, an automated and systematic approach for evaluating smart contracts’ static analysis tools. SolidiFI is based on injecting bugs (i.e., code defects) into all potential locations in a smart contract to introduce targeted security vulnerabilities. SolidiFI then checks the generated buggy contract using the static analysis tools, and identifies the bugs that the tools are unable to detect (false-negatives) along with identifying the bugs reported as false-positives. SolidiFI is used to evaluate six widely-used static analysis tools, namely, Oyente, Securify, Mythril, SmartCheck, Manticore and Slither, using a set of 50 contracts injected by 9369 distinct bugs. It finds several instances of bugs that are not detected by the evaluated tools despite their claims of being able to detect such bugs, and all the tools report many false positives.

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Index Terms

How effective are smart contract analysis tools? evaluating smart contract static analysis tools using bug injection
1. Security and privacy
  1. Software and application security

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cover image ACM Conferences

ISSTA 2020: Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

July 2020

591 pages

ISBN:9781450380089

DOI:10.1145/3395363

General Chair:
Sarfraz Khurshid
University of Texas at Austin, USA
,
Program Chair:
Corina S. Păsăreanu
Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley / NASA Ames Research Center, USA

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Published: 18 July 2020

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.3390/jcp4040040
Alsunaidi SAljamaan HHammoudeh M(2024)MultiTagging: A Vulnerable Smart Contract Labeling and Evaluation FrameworkElectronics10.3390/electronics1323461613:23(4616)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13234616
Ge XFang CLi XSun WWu DZhai JLin SZhao ZLiu YChen Z(2024)Machine Learning for Actionable Warning Identification: A Comprehensive SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/369635257:2(1-35)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3696352
Wei ZSun JZhang ZZhang XYang XZhu L(2024)Survey on Quality Assurance of Smart ContractsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/369586457:2(1-36)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2024
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