Guiding Automated Test Case Generation for Transaction-Reverting Statements in Smart Contracts

Abstract

Transaction-reverting statements are key constructs within Solidity that are extensively used for authority and validity checks. Current state-of-the-art search-based testing and fuzzing approaches do not explicitly handle these statements and therefore can not effectively detect security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we argue that it is critical to directly handle and test these statements to assess that they correctly protect the contracts against invalid requests. To this aim, we propose a new approach that improves the search guidance for these transaction-reverting statements based on interprocedural control dependency analysis, in addition to the traditional coverage criteria. We assess the benefits of our approach by performing an empirical study on 100 smart contracts w.r.t. transaction-reverting statement coverage and vulnerability detection capability. Our results show that the proposed approach can improve the performance of DynaMOSA, the state-of-the-art algorithm for test case generation. On average, we improve transaction-reverting statement coverage by 14 % (up to 35 %), line coverage by 8 % (up to 32 %), and vulnerability-detection capability by 17 % (up to 50 %).

Mitchell Olsthoorn

PhD student

Mitchell Olsthoorn is a Ph.D. student in the Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) at Delft University of Technology. He is also a member of the Computational Intelligence for Software Engineering lab (CISELab) and the Blockchain lab. Mitchell holds an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science – with a specialization in Cyber Security and Blockchain. His interests include network security, computational intelligence, and pen-testing. Mitchell is currently working on Security testing for blockchain.