Automated Generation of Test Cases for Smart Contract Security Analyzers

• Main Authors: Ki Byung Kim, Jonghyup Lee
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2020-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Smart contracts; static analysis; security audits; honey pots
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9268135/

We address the absence of reliable tests on contract analyzers of smart contracts and present a systematic method to diversify test cases by combining smart-contract-specific bugs and static analysis barriers in this paper. Using contract analyzers is the most practical solution for building a secure blockchain service, but they are relatively immature and lacking stable performance metrics. Traditionally, performance reports only compare static contract analyzers with pre-defined test cases, such as the Juliet test suite. However, building such test suites is burdensome for smart contracts, which are frequently change. In this paper, we propose an automated method to assess contract analyzers of smart contracts by diversifying test cases. In the experimental results, we identified nine erroneous alarms in the state-of-the-art contract analyzers with automatically generated test cases on five vulnerabilities.