SCH-Hunter: A Taint-Based Hybrid Fuzzing Framework for Smart Contract Honeypots

Abstract

Existing smart contract honeypot detection approaches exhibit high false negatives and positives due to (i) their inability to generate transaction sequences triggering order-dependent traps and (ii) their limited code coverage from traditional fuzzing’s random mutations. In this paper, we propose a hybrid fuzzing framework for smart contract honeypot detection based on taint analysis, SCH-Hunter. SCH-Hunter conducts source-code-level feature analysis of smart contracts and extracts data dependency relationships between variables from the generated Control Flow Graph to construct specific transaction sequences for fuzzing. A symbolic execution module is also introduced to resolve complex conditional branches that fuzzing alone fails to penetrate, enabling constraint solving. Furthermore, real-time dynamic taint propagation monitoring is implemented using taint analysis techniques, leveraging taint flow information to optimize seed mutation processes, thereby directing mutation resources toward high-value code regions. Finally, by integrating EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) code instrumentation with taint information flow analysis, the framework effectively identifies and detects security-sensitive operations, ultimately generating a comprehensive detection report. Empirical results are as follows. (i) For code coverage, SCH-Hunter performs better than the state-of-art tool, HoneyBadger, achieving higher average code coverage rates on both datasets, surpassing it by 4.79% and 17.41%, respectively. (ii) For detection capabilities, SCH-Hunter is not only roughly on par with HoneyBadger in terms of precision and recall rate but also capable of detecting a wider variety of smart contract honeypot techniques. (iii) For the evaluation of components, we conducted three ablation studies to demonstrate that the proposed modules in SCH-Hunter significantly improve the framework’s detection capability, code coverage, and detection efficiency, respectively.