SmartEmbed: A Tool for Clone and Bug Detection in Smart Contracts through Structural Code Embedding

Abstract

Ethereum has become a widely used platform to enable secure, Blockchain-based financial and business transactions. However, a major concern in Ethereum is the security of its smart contracts. Many identified bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts not only present challenges to maintenance of blockchain, but also lead to serious financial loses. There is a significant need to better assist developers in checking smart contracts and ensuring their reliability. In this paper, we propose a web service tool, named SMARTEMBED, which can help Solidity developers to find repetitive contract code and clone-related bugs in smart contracts. Our tool is based on code embeddings and similarity checking techniques. By comparing the similarities among the code embedding vectors for existing solidity code in the Ethereum blockchain and known bugs, we are able to efficiently identify code clones and clone-related bugs for any solidity code given by users, which can help to improve the users' confidence in the reliability of their code. In addition to the uses by individual developers, SMARTEMBED can also be applied to studies of smart contracts in a large scale. When applied to more than 22K solidity contracts collected from the Ethereum blockchain, we found that the clone ratio of solidity code is close to 90%, much higher than traditional software, and 194 clonerelated bugs can be identified efficiently and accurately based on our small bug database with a precision of 96%. SMARTEMBED can be accessed at http://www.smartembed.net. A demo video of SMARTEMBED is at https://youtu.be/o9ylyOpYFq8

Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges

“…• Specialized testing frameworks [258] • Automated software testing • AI powered software testing • Improved software practices [259], [260] • Specialized bug detection tools [261], [262] , [263] • Bug classification [48]…”

“…The proposed work reduces the testing overheads and make the bug fixing process more convenient. Gao et al [261] presented SmartEmbed which can be used to identify the clone related bugs in solidity smart contracts. The proposed solution supports identification of bugs in the individual scale as well as large scale.…”

Generating Question Titles for Stack Overflow from Mined Code Snippets

“…Recently, an interesting direction of software engineering is to use machine/deep learning for different tasks to improve software development. Such as code search (e.g., [2,24,31,39]), clone detection (e.g., [7,18,19,64,67]), program repair (e.g,. [10,45,60,66]), document (such as API and questions/answers/tags) recommendation (e.g., [22,25,26,55,63,65,69,70,76]).…”

“…We further conducted a primitive clone detection analysis to remove the noisy examples from our testing data set. A lot of methods have been proposed for clone detection in recent years (e.g., [7,18,19,64,67]). We followed the approach proposed by [18] for clone detection.…”

“…A lot of methods have been proposed for clone detection in recent years (e.g., [7,18,19,64,67]). We followed the approach proposed by [18] for clone detection. For each code snippet, we compose a numerical vector by summing up the word embedding vectors for all the relevant tokens within the code snippet.…”