Blockchain Papers

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638 papersLast indexed Aug 31, 2026
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Aug 26, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
Point-in-Time Audit Before Alpha: Public-Archive Availability and a Negative Matched-Budget Study on BTC Perpetual Futures

Baocheng Zeng, Jinhao Yang, Peilin Han, Kangnan He

Public cryptocurrency archives may appear usable when files exist, although factor research requires observations available and executable at each decision time. We audit public Binance BTCUSDT USD-M perpetual-futures data using event, publication, and availability times and separate proposal from deterministic auditing, evaluation, and holdout access. An initial gapless five-minute requirement for trade, mark, index, and open interest failed: the longest unrepaired intersection was 304.5729166666667 days. A disclosed revision made trade, mark, index, and realized funding the core streams and made open interest optional because its publication time was unverified. The revised mask retained 727 complete UTC days and supported a 436/145/146-day train, validation, and historical-holdout split. On 80 frozen known-rule templates, the auditor detected 40/40 violations and rejected 0/40 legal templates. Across ten null-signal paths, full auditing reduced mean false passes from 0.2910 to 0.0625. Under matched valid-candidate budgets, the audited adaptive agent tied random search and did not establish superiority. In the one-time historical holdout, all evaluated runs had positive IC but negative net Sharpe under primary costs. We therefore report a scoped negative result rather than a profitability or agent-superiority claim.

Open access
2 source records
cs.SE
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Auditing, Earnings Management, Governance
Original source
Aug 13, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Smart Contract Invariants Protect Against Cybercriminals

Sofia Bobadilla, Humaira Afrin, Angela Novelli, Martin Monperrus

Blockchains are among the most adversarial environments in computing. Billions are stolen by cybercriminals who exploit vulnerabilities. This is an open problem and no concept or technique has proven to really make a difference. In this paper, we claim that the classical notion of program invariant is perhaps the most powerful solution to the problem. We devise anoriginal experimental protocol to 1) study how invariants would have protected against past real-world attacks and 2) whether state-of-the-art automated tools can find them. The experimental toolchain is sophisticated. It is based on INVARIANTEVAL, a benchmark of 28 real Ethereum exploits, each paired with a human-authored invariant that blocks the attack. We validate every invariant with PONDEREPLAY, a replay framework that re-executes transactions in order to prove the correctness and soundness of smart contract invariants. We demonstrate that smart contract invariants block all the cybercriminal attacks in INVARIANTEVAL, fully validated by replaying 108,637 historical transactions. Our large-scale experiments clearly demonstrate that smart contract invariants protect against cybercriminals.

Open access
cs.CR
cs.SE
Original source
Aug 10, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Enhancing Reliability of Symbolic Execution Tools for Smart Contract Analysis through Rule-Based False Positive Reduction

Muhammad Ali Hassan Ahmad, Muhammad Hashim Ali, Muhammad Ali Amer, Muhammad Naiman Jalil · 6 authors

A blockchain is a decentralized, secure ledger system that enables transparent and immutable record-keeping, essential for trust and security in digital transactions. Smart contracts are self-executing agreements encoded on a blockchain, enabling different parties to fulfill the terms of the agreement automatically. These contracts trigger corresponding actions when conditions are met, ensuring decentralized and transparent transactions. Writing reliable smart contracts is challenging due to the lack of standardization. To find security vulnerabilities, tools based on various approaches, including symbolic execution, are used. However, these tools often report a large number of false positives, raising concerns about their reliability. The time and effort spent investigating false positives diverts resources from addressing actual vulnerabilities. Therefore, such tools must also be evaluated according to the rate of false positives they exhibit. More importantly, the algorithms and heuristics used by the tools must be enhanced to distinguish between true vulnerabilities and false alarms. In this paper, we first demonstrate the prevalence of false positives in vulnerability reports generated by Mythril, a symbolic execution-based analysis tool for Ethereum smart contracts. We analyze the root causes of these inaccuracies and devise a rule-based approach based on the gained insight to reduce false positives. We implement our rules for the most impactful vulnerabilities in Mythril and assess the effectiveness of our approach. Our results show a significant reduction in false positives without compromising the detection of true vulnerabilities, thus enhancing the tool's reliability.

Open access
cs.SE
Original source
Jul 30, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Demystifying Solana Bots: From GitHub Blueprints to On-Chain Fingerprints

Xiaoye Zheng, Yujing Chen, Minghao Wu, David Lo · 8 authors

Solana is an emerging blockchain platform designed for high throughput and low transaction fees, making it inexpensive to submit transactions at scale and, consequently, increasing exposure to bot spamming and related financial exploitation. Solana bots are typically off-chain software systems that operate in a competitive on-chain execution environment by constructing and submitting transactions, and the bot-related transactions on the decentralized exchanges exceed 250 million dollars in daily trading volume in January 2026. Prior studies on Solana have examined system performance, smart-contract security, and specific on-chain phenomena. However, we still lack a systematic understanding of what Solana bots implement in practice and how these implementations manifest as observable on-chain execution fingerprints. To address this gap, we performed a large-scale empirical study of Solana bots from two complementary views: (i) 586 bot repositories collected from GitHub, and (ii) 200 bot addresses on Solana, with over 44 million on-chain transactions. Our study derives an implementation-grounded taxonomy of Solana bots comprising 15 categories grouped into five domains (e.g., Trading Operations, MEV, and On-chain Analytics), identifies a largely shared five-stage operational pipeline manifested in bot implementations, and uncovers systematic variation in on-chain trading behaviors of Solana bots across diverse trading platforms and assets. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions, and provide recommendations for building and operating bots on the Solana blockchain.

Open access
cs.SE
Original source
Jul 29, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
TrustChain-Review: A Risk-Adaptive Blockchain and Game-Theoretic Framework for Trustworthy AI-Assisted Code Review

Mohammad Naserameri

Context: AI-assisted software development can speed up coding and review, but it also makes accountability harder to establish. Developers may submit insufficiently verified code, reviewers may approve changes with limited inspection, and centralized reputation records may be difficult to audit. Objectives: This study introduces TrustChain-Review, a framework that combines verifiable evidence, strategic incentives, and risk-sensitive governance to support more trustworthy code review. Methods: The framework includes a blockchain-based evidence layer, a three-player game-theoretic model for developers, reviewers, and the platform, and a rule that applies stronger governance when the expected benefit justifies its cost. The evaluation uses a controlled simulation calibrated with the Diff Quality Estimation dataset. Six governance configurations are compared over 30 independent runs using reputation accuracy, trust convergence, malicious-review detection, superficial-review detection, net platform utility, governance cost, and cost-efficiency. Results: The full-evidence configuration produces the strongest reputation, trust, and detection results, but it also has the highest governance cost. The risk-adaptive configuration lowers this cost and improves cost-efficiency by applying stronger controls selectively, although its trust and detection results are lower than those of the full-evidence setting. Conclusion: Strong evidence-based governance is most appropriate for high-risk or audit-sensitive changes. For routine or lower-risk contributions, selective governance offers a more practical balance between trustworthiness and operational cost.

Open access
cs.SE
Original source
Jul 28, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
NFR-to-Code Traceability in a Blockchain-IoT System: An Empirical Study

Yifei Wang, Jacky Keung, Xiaoxue Ma, Shijie Zhang · 5 authors

Requirement-to-Code traceability has been widely studied, yet existing research and public benchmarks remain largely centered on functional requirements (FRs). In contrast, traceability for non-functional requirements (NFRs) remains more difficult and underexplored, which hinders the verification of critical quality concerns such as security and reliability.This paper studies NFR-to-Code traceability based on a real-world blockchain-IoT project. We design an annotation protocol for constructing trace links across heterogeneous artifacts and build a manually curated subset containing both FR and NFR links. Using this subset, we examine the characteristics of NFR traceability and further evaluate four representative retrieval baselines: TF-IDF, BM25, LSI, and WMD. The results show that FR-to-Code tracing is consistently easier than NFR-to-Code tracing, while security-related NFRs are the most difficult subset. They further indicate that the main challenge of NFR traceability lies not in requirement availability, but in implementation evidence that is distributed and not clearly localized in code.

Open access
cs.SE
Original source
Jul 25, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
Towards LLM-assisted High-Quality Property Generation for Solidity Smart Contracts

Muhammad Wahid, Shahzaib Khan, Mashhood Ali, Muhammad Hassan · 6 authors

The immutable nature of smart contracts makes it challenging to fix and patch bugs once they are deployed to a blockchain. This implies that security vulnerabilities may be exposed to possible exploitation for a longer period, necessitating comprehensive pre-deployment testing. Property-based testing combined with fuzzing has proven itself as a promising technique for uncovering vulnerabilities. Traditionally, system properties are written by human experts, which is time-consuming and consequently expensive.With the recent advancement in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their ability to 'understand' natural language and code semantics, it may be possible to generate effective properties. This study, leverages state-of-the-art LLMs to generate high-quality properties for Soliditybased smart contracts. We measure the quality of the generated properties using mutation testing. Our results show that LLMs have the potential to generate high-quality properties that are close to those written by human experts. We extensively evaluate LLMs using various prompting techniques (e.g., zero shot, few shot, and prompt chaining). Overall, we find that Gemini Pro 1.5, when combined with prompt chaining, achieves the highest average mutation score of 25.99% among all studied configurations, closely approaching the human written benchmark of 31.75%. However, our per contract analysis reveals notable variance, particularly for the LibBit contract, where Gemini Pro 1.5 under prompt chaining achieves a mutation score of 74.34%, which is on par with human written properties (74.83%). This highlights that while average performance is informative, individual contract level results demonstrate that LLMs can, in some cases, match expert level property generation.

Open access
3 source records
cs.SE
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Original source
Jul 24, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
DeFiScreener: Efficient DeFi Attack Pre-screening in Smart Contracts via Historical Case Matching

Rui Cao, Shaojing Fan, Zhimei Sui, Liming Fang · 7 authors

Blockchain and its killer applications, particularly decentralized finance (DeFi), are gaining widespread adoption, with over 5,200 DeFi projects deployed on mainstream blockchains as of January 2026. At the same time, security risks in DeFi are becoming increasingly serious. However, existing DeFi detection tools usually cover only specific attack types, exhibiting severely limited detection coverage. In this paper, we argue that an effective way to address this gap is to pre-screen vulnerable instances from large volumes of smart contract functions and call sequences. This is motivated by a key phenomenon we term "perilous temporal asymmetry". Inspired by this, we propose DeFiScreener, the first automated pre-screening framework for DeFi attacks that uses historical exploit cases to identify potentially vulnerable functions and call sequences. Given the full source code of a target project, DeFiScreener builds Function Call Trees (FCTs) and generates semantic embeddings for each function using a large language model (LLM), allowing both program structure and function intent to be analyzed together. It then applies a dual-level screening process. At the function level, function embeddings are matched against an Attack Pattern Library of historically exploited functions. At the sequence level, the proposed Attack Pattern Oriented Monte Carlo Tree Search (APO-MCTS) efficiently explores the FCTs and screens vulnerable call sequences. The identified candidates are ultimately passed to an LLM for further interpretive and security analysis. We empirically evaluate the DeFiScreener over datasets comprising 207 real-world DeFi attack incidents. Experimental results demonstrate that DeFiScreener achieves a remarkable 98.55% recall and 84.30% precision in attack pre-screening.

Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
cs.SE
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Original source
Jul 22, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
Towards Automated Formal Verification of zkEVMs Using LLM-Guided Constraint Synthesis

Sicong Huang, Jiang Zj, Yi Jiang, Ling-I Wu · 6 authors

Zero-Knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs) secure Ethereum rollups by generating zero-knowledge proofs that guarantee off-chain execution correctness. However, subtle implementation bugs (e.g., incorrect gas accounting) can lead to valid proofs certifying semantically faulty states, thereby silently defeating cryptographic guarantees. Formal verification via SMT solvers can prevent this, but is bottlenecked by specification: current zkEVM development practice lacks automated methods to translate Rust opcode handlers into verification models. Current practices rely on unsustainable manual specifications, while LLM-based approaches suffer from hallucination and lack formal guarantees. To address this, we propose VeriSynth, a framework that synthesizes executable Python/Z3 verification models from Rust zkEVM code. VeriSynth enforces a hybrid paradigm: an LLM acts strictly as a formalization frontend to translate code into symbolic constraints, while an SMT solver serves as the correctness arbiter. To handle complex multi-component state transitions, VeriSynth integrates semantic decomposition, retrieval-grounded prompting, and verification-guided auto-repair into a closed-loop pipeline. We evaluate VeriSynth on the first source-level zkEVM verification benchmark, encompassing both correct and faulty opcode implementations. VeriSynth achieves a bug detection rate of over 90%, substantially outperforming direct and conversational LLM baselines, as well as a production-grade handwritten mutation-testing suite. Ablation studies confirm that each pipeline component is critical to the framework's overall effectiveness.

Open access
3 source records
cs.SE
Security and Verification in Computing
Logic, programming, and type systems
Original source
Jul 20, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Chiral Analysis of Smart Contracts: Detecting Vulnerabilities from Relational Inconsistencies Across Business Paths

Yue Xue

Smart-contract vulnerabilities often arise from inconsistencies between business paths that should correspond to one another, such as single and batch entry points, direct and adapter-based flows, quote and execution paths, or inverse operations such as buy and sell. Existing analyzers are effective for many local syntactic and data-flow patterns, but they provide limited support for bugs whose oracle is relational: whether two semantically paired paths preserve compatible guards, state transitions, value flows, and failure behavior. This paper introduces chiral analysis, a relational model that treats paired business paths as implicit specifications for each other. We formalize chiral relations as static analogues of metamorphic relations, derive obligations over guards, actors, state, value, ordering, failure behavior, and external interactions, and report a vulnerability when a violated obligation has security impact. We implement this idea in ChiralDetector, a Solidity prototype that extracts business paths, ranks candidate pairs with static facts, applies LLM-based semantic filtering and detection, and validates and deduplicates findings. In a preliminary evaluation on the Phi protocol, ChiralDetector reduced 3,217 statically ranked path pairs to 1,643 semantic candidates, produced 101 deduplicated finding groups, and retained 44 strict-validator positives that manually collapsed to 13 effective unique issues. These include cross-art Merkle proof reuse, fee unit mismatches, public state-tracking helpers, and refund propagation gaps. The results suggest that chiral analysis can expose business-logic bug classes that are difficult to express as single-function rules while providing a structured way to control LLM cost and validator precision.

Open access
cs.SE
Original source
Jul 19, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
A RFID Based Campus Wide Payment System

Miraj Uddin Chowdhury, MD Khairul Islam Prime

This work titled "RFID Based Campuswide Payment System" introduces an innovative cashless payment solution for educational institutions. It uses RFID cards and a Raspberry Pi to enable hassle free payments for various campus services, such as cafeteria purchases, tuition fees, and library fines. A centralized database ensures real-time updates on transactions and account balances, accessible through a simple and user-friendly web interface. This work is involved in designing a secure system with object-oriented principles, setting up databases, and integrating hardware like RFID readers with a Raspberry Pi. The systems are proved to be a cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional payment methods, enhancing convenience and security for students and administrators. The study also explored similar RFID applications, like smart parking and attendance systems, to identify challenges and improvements. Looking ahead, it envisions features like wearable RFID devices, voice-activated payments, and blockchain integration to boost security and usability. Results show that this system simplifies campus payments and has the potential for broader adoption in similar environments.

Open access
cs.SE
cs.AI
Original source
Jul 17, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Show Me The Money: An Exercise in Proof-Driven Software Understanding

Joseph Tafese, Karthik Nukala, Hassen Saïdi, Natarajan Shankar · 6 authors

We present a case study on proof-driven software understanding of mature, security-critical infrastructure. While formal methods are traditionally applied during the design phase, we present our experience applying formal reasoning onto a mature industrial C++ codebase. We focus on a formal analysis of the core algorithm that implements the Stellar blockchain's SDEX order book. By combining large language models (LLMs), Prototype Verification System (PVS), and SeaHorn, we are able to prove core properties of the production codebase. Our approach also identified an inconsistency in documentation related to the reachability of an exception location. Most importantly, however, we produce artifacts that make it easy for code changes to be checked against established invariants. This work demonstrates how the strategic combination of theorem proving and model checking provides a path for delivering robust assurance to legacy systems.

Open access
cs.LO
cs.SE
Original source
Jul 8, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Finding and Understanding Miscompilation Bugs in the Solidity Compiler

Bhargava Shastry

Smart contract compilers are critical to ensuring the correctness of public blockchains whose defining characteristics are open-source and immutable code. We created SolSmith, a semantics-aware differential fuzz testing tool, to improve the quality of the Solidity compiler -- the most popular compiler for the Ethereum blockchain -- and spent over three years finding compiler defects that produce incorrect code. We call these defects miscompilation bugs. During this time period, we have discovered 25 miscompilation bugs that went unnoticed, some for multiple years. Our first contribution is to make compiler testing more rigorous. SolSmith achieves this goal by generating valid test programs that are likely to stress test code generation and optimization components. This helps SolSmith find bugs missed during routine testing that could potentially have serious implications for smart contracts and their users. Our second contribution is a qualitative and quantitative analysis of miscompilation bugs that we found in the Solidity compiler. We classify miscompilation bugs found by SolSmith based on their nature, root-causes, and impact on end-users. This sheds light on some pitfalls of optimizing compilers.

Open access
cs.SE
cs.CR
cs.PL
Original source
Jul 2, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
Knowledge Over Parameters: Evolving Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Yuqiang Sun, Han Liu, Ying Li, Yiran Zhang · 7 authors

Smart contract vulnerabilities are predominantly logic bugs whose detection requires structured, step-by-step procedural knowledge of attack patterns and contract semantics. Existing LLM-based methods struggle to generate this knowledge automatically: prompt-based methods rely on manually crafted detection rules, while fine-tuning requires massive labeled datasets that are inherently scarce in this domain. We present EvoVuln, an automated framework that reformulates vulnerability detection as a procedural knowledge evolution problem, synthesizing and refining detection logic using only a minimal number of labeled samples. To achieve this, EvoVuln introduces two key mechanisms. First, a Runtime with an Inversion of Control (IoC) architecture compiles detection rules into Executable Policies. This strictly decouples deterministic control flow from LLM semantic reasoning, ensuring faithful logical adherence and producing dense diagnostic telemetry for precise error localization. Second, a two-phase evolution pipeline refines the rule via abductive semantic debugging without any parameter updates: Cold Start bootstraps and stress-tests an initial rule using auto-synthesized corner cases; Few-Shot Evolving then grounds the policy in real-world semantics using only five vulnerable and five safe examples per vulnerability type. Evaluated across five real-world vulnerability types, EvoVuln achieves a 71% macro-average F1-score, outperforming all baselines. The evolved procedural knowledge is portable across models: it enables a lightweight, low-cost model to surpass a much larger zero-shot model by 19 percentage points, and transfers to other LLMs without retraining, at a one-time evolution cost under $50.

Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
cs.SE
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Original source
Jun 24, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
The Web4 Agent Economy: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of the Landscape, Challenges, and Opportunities

Y Jin, Shuohan Wu, Chong Chen, Lingfeng Bao · 6 authors

The Internet is transitioning from Web3 toward Web4, where autonomous agents serve as independent economic actors. These agents can now hold crypto wallets, execute on-chain trades, and pay for external API calls. This transition calls for a new infrastructure stack capable of supporting key agent operations, including agent-to-tool interaction, agent-to-agent payments, and verifiable agent identity, represented by emerging protocols such as the Model Context Protocol, x402, and EIP-8004. Despite growing industrial interest in these protocols, the real-world Web4 agent ecosystem remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of the Web4 ecosystem. Specifically, our study targets three interconnected questions: how Web4 agents are deployed and used in practice; what engineering challenges developers face when building Web4 agents; how current project communities respond to these challenges. To answer these questions, we analyze 99,448 multi-chain identity registrations, 317,596,323 transaction logs, the source code of 341 MCP projects, and 349 filtered GitHub issues. Our findings reveal that autonomous agents have established a highly active machine-to-machine payment economy, processing millions of daily transactions. However, this growth is built on immature infrastructure, including identity/authorization practice, cross-environment operation, and payment interoperability. Our follow-up analysis shows that community responses are visible but unevenly distributed across repositories, and payment interoperability remains the most persistent unresolved bottleneck. Overall, this study reveals a critical gap between the rapid growth of the Web4 agent economy and its fragile underlying infrastructure, highlighting future directions for building a more secure Web4 agent ecosystem.

Open access
3 source records
Mobile Agent-Based Network Management
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Spam and Phishing Detection
Original source
Jun 18, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Repository-Level Solidity Code Generation with Large Language Models: From Prompting to Fine-Tuning

Shi Chen, Rongcun Wang, Yuan Tian, Xiaoyuan Xie · 6 authors

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in general-purpose code generation, but their effectiveness in specialized software domains remains underexplored. Solidity smart contracts represent a high-stakes domain where generated code must satisfy strict language-level, security, and software-engineering constraints. Existing benchmarks and metrics remain insufficient for repository-level Solidity generation, where models must synthesize complete contracts from natural language requirements. To address this gap, we introduce SolidityBench, a benchmark of 5,470 repository-level Solidity smart contracts paired with natural language descriptions. We also propose SolidityScore, a Solidity-aware semantic metric that emphasizes domain-critical constructs such as security modifiers, contract declarations, and Solidity-specific keywords. Using this benchmark, we evaluate representative code LLMs, including Qwen2.5-Coder, DeepSeek-Coder, and CodeLlama, across zero-shot prompting, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, in-context learning, retrieval-augmented generation, and supervised fine-tuning. The results show that general-purpose models exhibit systematic structural deficiencies in repository-level Solidity generation. Among non-parametric methods, retrieval-augmented generation performs best, while in-context learning degrades beyond two examples due to context saturation. Supervised fine-tuning achieves the largest improvement by internalizing Solidity-specific constraints into model parameters. Overall, our study provides a comprehensive benchmark for repository-level Solidity code generation and shows that high-quality domain data combined with supervised fine-tuning is the most effective strategy for improving the reliability of LLM-generated smart contracts.

Open access
cs.SE
Original source
Jun 12, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Security Threats and Their Impact on Blockchain Interoperability: Identification and Countermeasures

Shawn M. Reynolds, Hassan Reza

Blockchain interoperability enables independent blockchain systems to communicate and exchange assets across heterogeneous networks. However, the lack of comprehensive security mechanisms remains a critical weakness -- one that attackers have already exploited to cause hundreds of millions of dollars in asset losses. This paper presents a systematic identification and classification of security threats facing interoperable blockchain systems, along with corresponding countermeasures for each. We organize threats into five categories: (1) core blockchain attacks, (2) network attacks, (3) interoperability-specific attacks, (4) social engineering, and (5) code vulnerabilities, with particular attention to smart contract weaknesses. For each identified threat, we analyze its attack surface and propose effective defensive strategies. The resulting taxonomy provides a structured foundation for designing and evaluating secure blockchain interoperability solutions.

Open access
cs.SE
cs.CR
Original source
Jun 5, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
MalSkillBench: A Runtime-Verified Benchmark of Malicious Agent Skills

Wenbo Guo, Wei Zeng, Chengwei Liu, Xiaojun Jia · 8 authors

AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Gemini CLI increasingly extend themselves with third-party skills: markdown packages bundling natural-language instructions, executable scripts, and tool permissions. Because a skill is at once code and agent-facing instruction, it introduces a supply chain dependency whose risk is neither pure code nor pure prompt. Detection tools have never been measured against verified ground truth spanning this hybrid space, leaving their effectiveness unknown and wild-only evaluations biased. We present MalSkillBench, the first runtime-verified benchmark of malicious agent skills: 3,944 malicious skills labeled along a three-dimensional taxonomy of 108 cells. Of these, 3,214 come from a closed-loop Generate-Verify-Feedback pipeline admitting only samples whose malicious behavior fires inside a Docker sandbox under system-call monitoring and an LLM judge; we add 703 in-the-wild and 4,000 matched benign skills. Our measurements are consistent: code injection reaches 94.5% verification yield but prompt injection only 75.8%, the same fragility that later makes it hard to detect; the wild sample is narrow, dominated by one cryptocurrency-theft campaign (86.6% one behavior, 81% from two accounts) with a small but architecturally new tail attacking the agent control plane; the strongest skill-specific detector reaches 98.4% recall on code injection yet collapses on prompt-injection and agent-control attacks, and wild-only scoring swings the ranking by up to 66 recall points; supply-chain scanners and prompt-injection defenses each see only half of a skill, and no combination recovers the code-instruction relationship. Detecting malicious skills therefore requires reasoning jointly over task intent, code, and instructions. We release the dataset, pipeline, baselines, and results.

Open access
cs.CR
cs.SE
Original source
Jun 5, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
On the Shoulders of Giants: Empowering Automated Smart Contract Auditing via the GiAnt Corpus

Xiaoting Zhang, Zhipeng Gao, Yiran Lv, Xing Hu · 6 authors

High-quality smart contract auditing datasets are crucial for evaluating security tools and advancing smart contract security research. Two major limitations of existing datasets are the manual-induced scalability bottleneck and the deficiency in data granularity and diversity. To address these limitations, we propose GiANT, an automated framework designed to curate smart contract auditing datasets by distilling vulnerability insights from real-world auditing reports. GiANT employs a divide-and-conquer strategy coupled with the Chain-of-Thought technique to extract structured vulnerability information from Code4rena reports, followed by an LLM-as-a-judge mechanism to perform rigorous quality assurance. To evaluate GiANT's effectiveness, we run it on 388 real-world audit reports and generate the GiAnt Corpus comprising 7,711 vulnerability findings across five severity levels. Manual assessment of the dataset demonstrates exceptional reliability in information extraction, achieving a mean quality score of $4.76\pm0.37$ (out of 5) with inter-rater agreement $κ$ of 0.88. We further validate the practicality of our dataset by benchmarking 4 state-of-the-art LLMs on vulnerability detection, code summarization, mitigation recommendation, and automated gas optimization tasks, to establish performance baselines, thereby providing a valuable data foundation for future research in automated smart contract auditing.

Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
cs.SE
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Original source
Jun 3, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
A formal framework for the economic security of DeFi compositions

Massimo Bartoletti, Riccado Marchesin, Roberto Zunino

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) services are usually constructed by composing a variety of smart contracts. While composability is a key driver of the success of DeFi, it also creates security risks: adversaries may exploit interactions between newly deployed contracts and the pre-existing ones to inflict economic losses. We introduce MEV non-interference, a formal security notion for DeFi composability requiring that the maximal extractable value from a set of newly deployed contracts is not increased by interactions with the existing blockchain state. To support this notion, we define local MEV, a novel measure of economic attacks that focusses on the loss of a given set of victim contracts. We study two adversarial models, with bounded and unbounded wealth, and establish sufficient conditions and locality principles that enable modular reasoning about secure composability. We apply the framework to representative DeFi compositions, including exchanges, AMMs, options, lending pools, routers, and arbitrage contracts, showing how it distinguishes secure compositions from vulnerable ones. Our results provide a formal foundation for reasoning about the economic security of DeFi compositions.

Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
cs.SE
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Original source
May 28, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
Agora: Toward Autonomous Bug Detection in Production-Level Consensus Protocols with LLM Agents

Xiang Liu, Sa Song, Zhaowei Zhang, Huiying Lan · 9 authors

Consensus protocols form the backbone of distributed systems and blockchains, where implementation bugs can cause data corruption and financial losses. While LLM-based approaches show promise in code analysis, they struggle with deep protocol-level logic bugs involving complex state-dependent behaviors across multiple execution stages. We present Agora, a domain-aware multi-agent framework that integrates hypothesis-driven testing with LLM capabilities for systematic protocol verification. Agora employs specialized agents that collaboratively explore protocol state spaces, synthesize attack scenarios using domain-specific constraints, and validate findings through iterative refinement. This explicit role separation enables reasoning about global protocol invariants beyond single-function code analysis. We evaluate Agora on four consensus implementations (Raft, EPaxos, HotStuff, BullShark) using four state-of-the-art LLMs. Agora discovers 15 previously unknown protocol-level logic bugs that violate safety properties, while existing LLM-based agents fail to detect any such protocol-level logic bugs. Our results demonstrate that domain-aware multi-agent collaboration is essential for detecting deep logic bugs in complex protocols.

Open access
cs.SE
cs.AI
Original source
May 27, 2026·arXiv (Cornell University)
0 cites
SCDBench: A Benchmark for LLM-Based Smart Contract Decompilers

Kaihua Qin, Dawn Song, Arthur Gervais

Smart contract decompilation aims to recover high-level source code from bytecode, but evaluating decompilers remains difficult because existing studies use narrow datasets, inconsistent metrics, and limited semantic consistency checks. This gap is increasingly important as large language models (LLMs) begin to generate source-like Solidity that may compile and appear plausible, even when its semantics diverge from the original contract. We introduce SCDBench, a dataset and benchmark methodology for LLM-based smart contract decompilation. The dataset contains 600 real-world Solidity contracts with paired bytecode inputs, ground-truth source code, and replayable semantic checkpoints. SCDBench evaluates decompiler outputs through four cumulative stages: format completeness, compilability, Application Binary Interface (ABI) recovery, and semantic consistency via differential replay. We evaluate Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.3-Codex, and GLM-5 in a zero-shot decompilation setting, including GLM-5 variants with and without extended reasoning and a zero-shot compilation-repair setting. The results show that frontier LLMs can often produce structured and compilable Solidity, but achieving semantic consistency remains far from solved: the best-performing frontier model perfectly decompiles only 42/600 contracts. We further show that introducing same-model compilation repair substantially improves performance at modest additional cost. SCDBench establishes a common ground for rigorous, reproducible evaluation and aims to accelerate the development of reliable smart contract decompilers for blockchain security and transparency.

Open access
3 source records
cs.SE
cs.AI
cs.CR
Original source
May 21, 2026·arXiv
0 cites
An Architecture for Decentralised Deployment and Operation of Blockchain Applications

Fabian Stiehle, Kirill Inozemtsev, Ingo Weber

Blockchains and distributed ledger technologies allow the operation of manifold decentralised applications (dApps). Such applications are based on smart contracts, a programmable abstraction that is executed in a decentralised manner. To ensure the correctness of smart contracts, blockchain application developers rely on DevOps practices such as automated testing and continuous integration and deployment. However, such infrastructure is often controlled by single entities. For larger blockchain applications, this issue is resolved by relying on concepts of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), which allow proposals to be autonomously executed once they reach a pre-defined quorum. Such a governance architecture is complex and requires integration with existing patterns for contract discovery and upgradeability. In this paper we integrate these concepts considering DevOps best-practices into a novel architecture that remains agnostic to different governance and upgrade implementations. We extend the known registry pattern to support deterministic deployments and present a decentralised deployment framework, including integration and deployment pipelines, user-interfaces, and version control integration. In our approach, each party implements and verifies their own tests before engaging in the use of a (newly deployed) smart contract. We provide a reference implementation, available as open-source, and evaluate the proposal thoroughly. Our architecture can serve as a reference for future integrations, while our open-source framework is aimed at reducing the complexity of adopting such a process in practice.

Open access
cs.SE
Original source
May 15, 2026·arXiv
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Optimizing an IDE for an Evolving Language Ecosystem

Adam Welc, Todd Nowacki, Dario Russi, Cameron Swords · 5 authors

This paper describes a strategy for developing a high performance and feature-rich IDE for an evolving smart contract language ecosystem. Our target is Move, a programming language for the Sui smart contracts platform. The strategy we chose to support the Move language ecosystem utilizes Language Server Protocol (LSP) and it is based on the already existing "core" language machinery, in particular the core language compiler. We discuss alternatives we considered, as well as the evolution of our infrastructure that was necessary to keep up with the growth of the language ecosystem, particularly with respect to optimizations (and their impact) that needed to be implemented to accommodate this growth. We conclude with lessons learned during the IDE support development process that we hope will be beneficial for others attempting to follow a similar path.

Open access
cs.SE
Original source