Honeytoken-Detector: A Symbolic Execution-Based Honeypot Token Detection Tool

Abstract

Smart contracts have emerged as one of the most successful applications in the blockchain domain, playing a significant role in various blockchain ecosystems. Inspired by smart contracts, a multitude of cryptographic assets have been created. To standardize these assets, industry standards such as ERC20 (Ethereum Request for Comments 20), ERC721, and ERC1155 have been proposed. In recent years, smart contracts have frequently fallen victim to attacks. Honeypot contracts, disguised as ERC20-compliant tokens, are widely prevalent on the blockchain, enticing victims to make purchases. Such malicious smart contracts exhibiting deceptive behavior are collectively referred to as honeypot tokens. This paper focuses on ERC20-compliant smart contracts and defines six common types of honeypot issues. Building upon advancements in smart contract vulnerability detection, we propose an enhanced symbolic execution-based detection tool called Honeytoken-Detector. We conduct experiments on both contracts known to have similar issues and actual token contracts from the real world. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in identifying vulnerabilities.