Specification Mining for Smart Contracts with Trace Slicing and Predicate Abstraction
2025 (English)In: Proceedings - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2025, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2025, p. 147-158Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Smart contracts are computer programs running on blockchains to implement Decentralized Applications. The absence of contract specifications hinders routine tasks, such as contract understanding and testing. In this work, we propose a specification mining approach to infer contract specifications from past transaction histories. Our approach derives high-level behavioral automata of function invocations, accompanied by program invariants statistically inferred from the transaction histories. We implemented our approach as tool SMCON and evaluated it on eleven well-studied Azure benchmark smart contracts and six popular real-world DApp smart contracts. The experiments show that SMCON mines reasonably accurate specifications that can be used to enhance symbolic analysis of smart contracts achieving higher code coverage and up to 56 % speedup, and facilitate DApp developers in maintaining high-quality documentation and test suites.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) , 2025. p. 147-158
Keywords [en]
predicate abstraction, smart contracts, specification mining
National Category
Computer Sciences Computer Systems
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-364404DOI: 10.1109/SANER64311.2025.00022ISI: 001506888600014Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105007306192OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-364404DiVA, id: diva2:1968218
Conference
32nd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2025, Montreal, Canada, March 4-7, 2025
Note
Part of ISBN 9798331535100
QC 20250615
2025-06-122025-06-122025-12-08Bibliographically approved