TPH-Fuzz: A Two-Phase Hybrid Fuzzing Framework for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Abstract

Blockchain technology is revolutionizing various industries through decentralized architecture and secure transaction mechanisms, yet its core application—smart contracts—faces increasingly sophisticated security threats. Recognizing the critical need for enhanced protection in this emerging domain, this paper introduces TPH-Fuzz, a two-phase hybrid fuzzing framework designed to overcome current limitations in vulnerability detection. TPH-Fuzz combines global exploration with local vulnerability targeting. It utilizes dynamic symbolic execution for semantics-aware path analysis and employs data-dependency-based state modeling to generate effective transaction sequences. These methods improve both path exploration and vulnerability detection precision significantly. Experiments on a coverage dataset of 9309 contracts demonstrate an 85% branch coverage on complex contracts, outperforming conventional methods; meanwhile, tests on a vulnerability dataset of 1086 labeled contracts show a detection precision of 89.24% across eight vulnerability categories. The promising results underscore the framework’s potential to transform security auditing practices in the blockchain industry, paving the way for more reliable smart contract development and deployment.