Automated Test-Case Generation for Solidity Smart Contracts: the AGSolT\n Approach and its Evaluation

Abstract

Blockchain and smart contract technology are novel approaches to data and\ncode management that facilitate trusted computing by allowing for development\nin a distributed and decentralized manner. Testing smart contracts comes with\nits own set of challenges which have not yet been fully identified and\nexplored. Although existing tools can identify and discover known\nvulnerabilities and their interactions on the Ethereum blockchain through\nrandom search or symbolic execution, these tools generally do not produce test\nsuites suitable for human oracles. In this paper, we present AGSOLT (Automated\nGenerator of Solidity Test Suites). We demonstrate its efficiency by\nimplementing two search algorithms to automatically generate test suites for\nstand-alone Solidity smart contracts, taking into account some of the\nblockchain-specific challenges. To test AGSOLT, we compared a random search\nalgorithm and a genetic algorithm on a set of 36 real-world smart contracts. We\nfound that AGSOLT is capable of achieving high branch coverage with both\napproaches and even discovered some errors in some of the most popular Solidity\nsmart contracts on Github.\n