DL4SC: a novel deep learning-based vulnerability detection framework for smart contracts

Smart contract is a new paradigm for the decentralized software system, which plays an important and key role in Blockchain-based application. The vulnerabilities in smart contracts are unacceptable, and some of which have caused significant economic losses. The machine learning, especially deep learning, is a very promising and potential approach to vulnerability detecting for smart contracts. At present, deep learning-based vulnerability detection methods have low accuracy, time-consuming, and too small application range. For dealing with these, we propose a novel deep learning-based vulnerability detection framework for smart contracts at opcode level, named as DL4SC. It orthogonally combines the Transformer encoder and CNN (convolutional neural networks) to detect vulnerabilities of smart contracts for the first time, and firstly exploit SSA (sparrow search algorithm) to automatically search model hyperparameters for vulnerability detection. We implement the framework DL4SC on deep learning platform Pytorch with Python, and compare it with existing works on the three public datasets and one dataset we collect. The experiment results show that DL4SC can accurately detect vulnerabilities of smart contracts, and performs better than state-of-the-art works for detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts. The accuracy and F1-score of DL4SC are 95.29% and 95.68%, respectively.