Enhanced Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection via Graph Neural Networks: Achieving High Accuracy and Efficiency

As blockchain technology becomes prevalent, smart contracts have shown significant utility in finance and supply chain management. However, vulnerabilities in smart contracts pose serious threats to blockchain security, leading to substantial economic losses. Therefore, developing effective vulnerability detection solutions is urgent. To address this issue, we propose a method for detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts using graph neural networks (GNNs) that can identify eight common vulnerabilities. Our method is fully automated, applicable to all Ethereum smart contracts, and does not require expert-defined rules or manually defined features. We extract the Control Flow Graph and Abstract Syntax Graph from the smart contract code, which are then processed by a GNN to generate feature vectors for classification. Experiments on a real Ethereum dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. For individual detection tasks, the combined source code and bytecode method achieves an average accuracy of 95.78%, with a peak of 99.13%, and an average F1 score of 93.80%. Compared to competitors, our method shows an average improvement of 51.92% in accuracy and 47.21% in F1 score. The bytecode-only method achieves an average accuracy of 94.68% and an F1 score of 92.36%. For multi-class tasks, both methods achieve high accuracies of 91.26% and 87.34%, with F1 scores of 97.42% and 96.43%, respectively.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Journal
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Published
2025-05-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.2025.3570421
Citations
4
Primary Topic
Artificial Intelligence in Law
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
34.09
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

Enhanced Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection via Graph Neural Networks: Achieving High Accuracy and Efficiency

Chang Xu, Kashif Sharif, Huaiyu Xu, Liehuang Zhu et al.
4 citations
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence in Law
34.09
article

Enhanced Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection via Graph Neural Networks: Achieving High Accuracy and Efficiency

Chang Xu, Kashif Sharif, Huaiyu Xu, Liehuang Zhu, Xiaodong Shen
article en
4 citations

Abstract

As blockchain technology becomes prevalent, smart contracts have shown significant utility in finance and supply chain management. However, vulnerabilities in smart contracts pose serious threats to blockchain security, leading to substantial economic losses. Therefore, developing effective vulnerability detection solutions is urgent. To address this issue, we propose a method for detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts using graph neural networks (GNNs) that can identify eight common vulnerabilities. Our method is fully automated, applicable to all Ethereum smart contracts, and does not require expert-defined rules or manually defined features. We extract the Control Flow Graph and Abstract Syntax Graph from the smart contract code, which are then processed by a GNN to generate feature vectors for classification. Experiments on a real Ethereum dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. For individual detection tasks, the combined source code and bytecode method achieves an average accuracy of 95.78%, with a peak of 99.13%, and an average F1 score of 93.80%. Compared to competitors, our method shows an average improvement of 51.92% in accuracy and 47.21% in F1 score. The bytecode-only method achieves an average accuracy of 94.68% and an F1 score of 92.36%. For multi-class tasks, both methods achieve high accuracies of 91.26% and 87.34%, with F1 scores of 97.42% and 96.43%, respectively.

IEEE Transactions on Software EngineeringVol. 51(6)
Beijing Institute of Technology (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 0%
Artificial Intelligence in Law
34.09
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.