Machine learning approaches for enhancing smart contracts security: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Smart contracts offer automation for various decentralized applications but suffer from vulnerabilities that cause financial losses. Detecting vulnerabilities is critical to safeguarding decentralized applications before deployment. Automatic detection is more efficient than manual auditing of large codebases. Machine learning (ML) has emerged as a suitable technique for vulnerability detection. However, a systematic literature review (SLR) of ML models is lacking, making it difficult to identify research gaps. No published systematic review exists for ML approaches to smart contract vulnerability detection. This research focuses on ML-driven detection mechanisms from various databases. 46 studies were selected and reviewed based on keywords. The contributions address three research questions: vulnerability identification, machine learning model approaches, and data sources. In addition to highlighting gaps that require further investigation, the drawbacks of machine learning are discussed. This study lays the groundwork for improving ML solutions by mapping technical challenges and future directions.