VSCL: Automating Vulnerability Detection in Smart Contracts with Deep Learning

Abstract

With the increase of the adoption of blockchain technology in providing decentralized solutions to various problems, smart contracts have become more popular to the point that billions of US Dollars are currently exchanged every day through such technology. Meanwhile, various vulnerabilities in smart contracts have been exploited by attackers to steal cryptocurrencies worth millions of dollars. The automatic detection of smart contract vulnerabilities therefore is an essential research problem. Existing solutions to this problem particularly rely on human experts to define features or different rules to detect vulnerabilities. However, this often causes many vulnerabilities to be ignored, and they are inefficient in detecting new vulnerabilities. In this study, to overcome such challenges, we propose the VSCL framework to automatically detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts on the blockchain. More specifically, first, we utilize novel feature vector generation techniques from bytecode of smart contract since the source code of smart contracts are rarely available in public. Next, the collected vectors are fed into our novel metric learning-based deep neural network(DNN) to get the detection result. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a large-scale benchmark, and the quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.