Towards Generating Cost-Effective Test-Suite for Ethereum Smart Contract

Abstract

In Ethereum, many accounts and funds have been managed by smart contracts, thereby making them easy to be targeted. Due to the persistence characteristic of blockchain, revising a deployed smart contract is almost impossible. Both realities heighten the risks of managing funds and thus increase the demand for conducting sufficient testing to Ethereum Smart Contracts (ESC). Different from the conventional software, ESC is a gas-driven program, where developers must charge gases for deploying and testing it. Therefore, it is important to provide a cost-effective yet representative test suite, where its representativeness can be typically measured by its branch coverage. In this paper, we deem the problem of ESC test generation as a Pareto minimization problem, and three objectives, minimizing (1) uncovered branch coverage, (2) time cost, and (3) gas cost are considered. Then, we propose a random based and an NSGA-II based multi-objective approach to seek cost-effective test-suites. Our empirical study on a set of smart contracts in eight of the most widely used Ethereum Decentralized Applications (DApps) verified that the proposed approaches could significantly reduce the gas cost as well as the time cost while retaining the ability to cover branches.