SCADE: a deep learning ensemble for semantic flow analysis in smart contract vulnerability detection

Abstract

A vulnerability in smart contracts refers to weaknesses in the code that can be exploited by attackers, leading to security breaches and unintended behavior. With the growing use of smart contracts in decentralized blockchain systems, particularly in internet of things (IoT) environments, ensuring their security has become increasingly critical. Traditional vulnerability detection techniques, such as formal verification and symbolic execution, face significant limitations, including high rates of false positives and negatives, scalability issues, and difficulty in detecting complex vulnerabilities. To address these challenges, this paper proposes semantic contract flow analysis and deep learning ensemble (SCADE) for smart contract vulnerability detection. SCADE leverages semantic flow analysis combined with an ensemble of deep learning models, including convolutional neural networks (CNN), bidirectional sequence encoder (BSE), layered probabilistic neural network (LPNN), and adaptive context learning network (ACLN), to detect vulnerabilities effectively. The methodology breaks down the smart contract code into structured components through a contract structure mapper, followed by extracting semantic paths and converting them into sequential vector representations. These representations are then processed through a deep learning ensemble to identify potential vulnerabilities such as reentrancy, timestamp dependency, code injection, and hardcoded gas amounts.