TY - JOUR
T1 - Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection Based on Symbolic Execution and Graph Neural Networks
AU - Sun, Haoxin
AU - Yu, Xiao
AU - Li, Jiale
AU - Xu, Yitong
AU - Yu, Jie
AU - Li, Huanhuan
AU - Li, Yuanzhang
AU - Tan, Yu An
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2025 The Authors.
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - Since the advent of smart contracts, security vulnerabilities have remained a persistent challenge, compromsing both the reliability of contract execution and the overall stability of the virtual currency market. Consequently, the academic community has devoted increasing attention to these security risks. However, conventional approaches to vulnerability detection frequently exhibit limited accuracy. To address this limitation, the present study introduces a novel vulnerability detection framework called GNNSE that integrates symbolic execution with graph neural networks (GNNs). The proposed method first constructs semantic graphs to comprehensively capture the control flow and data flow dependencies within smart contracts. These graphs are subsequently processed using GNNs to efficiently identify contracts with a high likelihood of vulnerabilities. For these high-risk contracts, symbolic execution is employed to perform fine-grained, path-level analysis, thereby improving overall detection precision. Experimental results on a dataset comprising 10,079 contracts demonstrate that the proposed method achieves detection precisions of 93.58% for reentrancy vulnerabilities and 92.73% for timestamp-dependent vulnerabilities.
AB - Since the advent of smart contracts, security vulnerabilities have remained a persistent challenge, compromsing both the reliability of contract execution and the overall stability of the virtual currency market. Consequently, the academic community has devoted increasing attention to these security risks. However, conventional approaches to vulnerability detection frequently exhibit limited accuracy. To address this limitation, the present study introduces a novel vulnerability detection framework called GNNSE that integrates symbolic execution with graph neural networks (GNNs). The proposed method first constructs semantic graphs to comprehensively capture the control flow and data flow dependencies within smart contracts. These graphs are subsequently processed using GNNs to efficiently identify contracts with a high likelihood of vulnerabilities. For these high-risk contracts, symbolic execution is employed to perform fine-grained, path-level analysis, thereby improving overall detection precision. Experimental results on a dataset comprising 10,079 contracts demonstrate that the proposed method achieves detection precisions of 93.58% for reentrancy vulnerabilities and 92.73% for timestamp-dependent vulnerabilities.
KW - graph neural networks
KW - Smart contracts
KW - symbolic execution
KW - vulnerability detection
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105024537656
U2 - 10.32604/cmc.2025.070930
DO - 10.32604/cmc.2025.070930
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105024537656
SN - 1546-2218
VL - 86
JO - Computers, Materials and Continua
JF - Computers, Materials and Continua
IS - 2
ER -