Ascertaining Susceptibilities in Smart Contracts: A Quantum Machine Learning Approach

Abstract

The current research aims to discover applications of QML approaches in realizing liabilities within smart contracts. These contracts are essential commodities of the blockchain interface and are also decisive in developing decentralized products. But liabilities in smart contracts could result in unfamiliar system failures. Presently, static detection tools are utilized to discover accountabilities. However, they could result in instances of false narratives due to their dependency on predefined rules. In addition, these policies can often be superseded, failing to generalize on new contracts. The detection of liabilities with ML approaches, correspondingly, has certain limitations with contract size due to storage and performance issues. Nevertheless, employing QML approaches could be beneficial as they do not necessitate any preconceived rules. They often learn from data attributes during the training process and are employed as alternatives to ML approaches in terms of storage and performance. The present study employs four QML approaches, namely, QNN, QSVM, VQC, and QRF, for discovering susceptibilities. Experimentation revealed that the QNN model surpasses other approaches in detecting liabilities, with a performance accuracy of 82.43%. To further validate its feasibility and performance, the model was assessed on a several-partition test dataset, i.e., SolidiFI data, and the outcomes remained consistent. Additionally, the performance of the model was statistically validated using McNemar's test.