Ethereum Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection and Machine Learning-Driven Solutions: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

In recent years, emerging trends like smart contracts (SCs) and blockchain have promised to bolster data security. However, SCs deployed on Ethereum are vulnerable to malicious attacks. Adopting machine learning methods is proving to be a satisfactory alternative to conventional vulnerability detection techniques. Nevertheless, most current machine learning techniques depend on sufficient expert knowledge and solely focus on addressing well-known vulnerabilities. This paper puts forward a systematic literature review (SLR) of existing machine learning-based frameworks to address the problem of vulnerability detection. This SLR follows the PRISMA statement, involving a detailed review of 55 papers. In this context, we classify recently published algorithms under three different machine learning perspectives. We explore state-of-the-art machine learning-driven solutions that deal with the class imbalance issue and unknown vulnerabilities. We believe that algorithmic-level approaches have the potential to provide a clear edge over data-level methods in addressing the class imbalance issue. By emphasizing the importance of the positive class and correcting the bias towards the negative class, these approaches offer a unique advantage. This unique feature can improve the efficiency of machine learning-based solutions in identifying various vulnerabilities in SCs. We argue that the detection of unknown vulnerabilities suffers from the absence of a unique definition. Moreover, current frameworks for detecting unknown vulnerabilities are structured to tackle vulnerabilities that exist objectively.