Slither: A Static Analysis Framework for Smart Contracts

Abstract

This paper describes Slither, a static analysis framework designed to provide rich information about Ethereum smart contracts. It works by converting Solidity smart contracts into an intermediate representation called SlithIR. SlithIR uses Static Single Assignment (SSA) form and a reduced instruction set to ease implementation of analyses while preserving semantic information that would be lost in transforming Solidity to bytecode. Slither allows for the application of commonly used program analysis techniques like dataflow and taint tracking. Our framework has four main use cases: (1) automated detection of vulnerabilities, (2) automated detection of code optimization opportunities, (3) improvement of the user's understanding of the contracts, and (4) assistance with code review.In this paper, we present an overview of Slither, detail the design of its intermediate representation, and evaluate its capabilities on real-world contracts. We show that Slither's bug detection is fast, accurate, and outperforms other static analysis tools at finding issues in Ethereum smart contracts in terms of speed, robustness, and balance of detection and false positives. We compared tools using a large dataset of smart contracts and manually reviewed results for 1000 of the most used contracts.• We present Slither, a framework for static analysis of

Empirical review of automated analysis tools on 47,587 Ethereum smart contracts

“…Tool URLs contractLarva [2] https://github.com/gordonpace/contractLarva E-EVM [33] https://github.com/pisocrob/E-EVM Echidna https://github.com/crytic/echidna Erays [44] https://github.com/teamnsrg/erays Ether [26] N/A Ethersplay https://github.com/crytic/ethersplay EtherTrust [19] https://www.netidee.at/ethertrust EthIR [1] https://github.com/costa-group/EthIR FSolidM [28] https://github.com/anmavrid/smart-contracts Gasper [9] N/A HoneyBadger [41] https://github.com/christoftorres/ HoneyBadger KEVM [21] https://github.com/kframework/evmsemantics MadMax [17] https://github.com/nevillegrech/MadMax Maian [32] https://github.com/MAIAN-tool/MAIAN Manticore [30] https://github.com/trailofbits/manticore/ Mythril [31] https://github.com/ConsenSys/mythril-classic Octopus https://github.com/quoscient/octopus Osiris [40] https://github.com/christoftorres/Osiris Oyente [27] https://github.com/melonproject/oyente Porosity [38] https://github.com/comaeio/porosity rattle https://github.com/crytic/rattle ReGuard [25] N/A Remix https://github.com/ethereum/remix SASC [43] N/A sCompile [6] N/A Securify [42] https://github.com/eth-sri/securify Slither [16] https://github.com/crytic/slither Smartcheck [39] https://github.com/smartdec/smartcheck Solgraph https://github.com/raineorshine/solgraph Solhint https://github.com/protofire/solhint SolMet [20] https://github.com/chicxurug/SolMet-Solidity-parser teEther [23] https://github.com/nescio007/teether Vandal [4] https://github.com/usyd-blockchain/vandal VeriSol [24] https://github.com/microsoft/verisol Zeus [22] N/A , developed by TrailOfBits, also uses symbolic execution to find execution paths in EVM bytecode that lead to reentrancy vulnerabilities and reachable self-destruct operations.…”

“…Slither [16], developed by TrailOfBits, is a static analysis framework that converts Solidity smart contracts into an intermediate representation called SlithIR and applies known program analysis techniques such as dataflow and taint tracking to extract and refine information.…”

“…Reproducibility is enabled by a benchmark containing smart contracts that other researchers can use off-the-shelf. There are just a few repositories of smart contracts available to the research community, such as VeriS-martBench 13 , evm-analyzer-benchmark-suite 14 , EthBench 15 , smartcontract-benchmark 16 , and not-so-smart-contracts 17 . These, however, are essentially collections of contracts and are not designed to enable reproducibility nor to facilitate comparison of research.…”

An Analysis of Smart Contracts Security Threats Alongside Existing Solutions

“…Slither is a static analysis framework written in Python 3 with dependencies on the Solidity Compiler (Solc) [ 55 ]. Slither uses a bundle of vulnerability detectors, printing the analysis results.…”

A Generalized Formal Semantic Framework for Smart Contracts

“…Related Works. There is a surge of interest in analyzing and verifying smart contracts [32,12,24,28,26,9,25,31,21,44,20,22,38,36,4,34,43,19,30,35,29,23,46,14]. Some of the existing works focus on EVM [2,47] (Ethereum Virtual Machine).…”