Contractsentry: a static analysis tool for smart contract vulnerability detection

Abstract

Frequent smart contract security incidents pose a threat to the credibility of the Ethereum platform, making smart contract vulnerability detection a focal point of concern. Previous research has proposed vulnerability detection methods in smart contracts. Generally, these tools rely on predefined rules to detect vulnerable smart contracts. However, using out-of-date rules for vulnerability detection may lead to a significant number of false negatives and false positives due to the growing variety of smart contract vulnerability types and the ongoing enhancement of vulnerability defense mechanisms. In this paper, we propose ContractSentry, a tool for static analysis of smart contracts. First, we preprocess Solidity code to build critical contract information and transform it into an intermediate representation. Then, based on the intermediate representations, we propose composite rules for vulnerability detection by analyzing the characteristics of different types of vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Finally, we evaluate ContractSentry with two datasets and compare it with state-of-the-art vulnerability detection tools. Experimental results demonstrate that ContractSentry achieves superior detection effectiveness.