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Xianhao Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xianhao Zhang.

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Beyond Detection: Agentic Attack Synthesis and Simulation for Smart Contracts

Smart contract vulnerabilities pose severe financial risks, yet existing security tools largely stop at vulnerability detection, offering limited support for explaining whether reported flaws are exploitable, how attacks unfold, and what concrete damage they cause. To bridge this gap, we propose KASS (Knowledge-Augmented Attack Synthesis and Simulation), a multi-agent framework for executable smart contract exploit verification. KASS decomposes automated exploit generation into planning, generation, and testing stages, and integrates three complementary mechanisms: retrieval-augmented planning over real-world audit knowledge, formal generation and validation constraints that bind attack plans to executable proof-of-concept tests, and a hierarchical dual-loop refinement process that repairs code-level errors while triggering strategy-level replanning when attack assumptions fail. We evaluate KASS on 104 SmartBugs-Curated contracts across four vulnerability categories. Experimental results show that KASS successfully generates executable exploits for 94.23% of tested contracts; this rate is higher than previously reported results for REX and AdvSCanner on comparable SmartBugs-Curated subsets, and higher than our reproduced Claude Code baseline under the same evaluation protocol. On 11 real-world CVE-tagged contracts, KASS successfully validates 9 cases. Beyond exploit generation, KASS produces structured attack plans that document exploitation flows, quantify potential asset losses, and serve as semantic false positive filters for static analysis tools.

cs.CR

FTSmartAudit: A Knowledge Distillation-Enhanced Framework for Automated Smart Contract Auditing Using Fine-Tuned LLMs

The rapid growth of blockchain technology has driven the widespread adoption of smart contracts. However, their inherent vulnerabilities have led to significant financial losses. Traditional auditing methods, while essential, struggle to keep pace with the increasing complexity and scale of smart contracts. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for automating vulnerability detection, but their adoption is often limited by high computational costs. Although prior work has explored leveraging large models through agents or workflows, relatively little attention has been given to improving the performance of smaller, fine-tuned models--a critical factor for achieving both efficiency and data privacy. In this paper, we introduce HKT-SmartAudit, a framework for developing lightweight models optimized for smart contract auditing. It features a multi-stage knowledge distillation pipeline that integrates classical distillation, external domain knowledge, and reward-guided learning to transfer high-quality insights from large teacher models. A single-task learning strategy is employed to train compact student models that maintain high accuracy and robustness while significantly reducing computational overhead. Experimental results show that our distilled models outperform both commercial tools and larger models in detecting complex vulnerabilities and logical flaws, offering a practical, secure, and scalable solution for smart contract auditing. The source code is available at Github repository.

cs.CR

A Comparative Evaluation of Automated Analysis Tools for Solidity Smart Contracts

Blockchain smart contracts have emerged as a transformative force in the digital realm, spawning a diverse range of compelling applications. Since solidity smart contracts across various domains manage trillions of dollars in virtual coins, they become a prime target for attacks. One of the primary challenges is keeping abreast of the latest techniques and tools for developing secure smart contracts and examining those already deployed. In this paper, we seek to address these challenges from four aspects: (1) We begin by examining ten automatic tools, specifically focusing on their methodologies and their ability to identify vulnerabilities in solidity smart contracts. (2) We propose a novel criterion for evaluating these tools, based on the ISO/IEC 25010 standard. (3) To facilitate the evaluation of the selected tools, we construct a benchmark that encompasses two distinct datasets: a collection of 389 labelled smart contracts and a scaled set of 20,000 unique cases from real-world contracts. (4) We provide a comparison of the selected tools, offering insights into their strengths and weaknesses and highlighting areas where further improvements are needed. Through this evaluation, we hope to provide developers and researchers with valuable guidance on selecting and using smart contract analysis tools and contribute to the ongoing efforts to improve the security and reliability of smart contracts.

cs.DC

LLM-SmartAudit: Advanced Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

The immutable nature of blockchain technology, while revolutionary, introduces significant security challenges, particularly in smart contracts. These security issues can lead to substantial financial losses. Current tools and approaches often focus on specific types of vulnerabilities. However, a comprehensive tool capable of detecting a wide range of vulnerabilities with high accuracy is lacking. This paper introduces LLM-SmartAudit, a novel framework leveraging the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect and analyze vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Using a multi-agent conversational approach, LLM-SmartAudit employs a collaborative system with specialized agents to enhance the audit process. To evaluate the effectiveness of LLM-SmartAudit, we compiled two distinct datasets: a labeled dataset for benchmarking against traditional tools and a real-world dataset for assessing practical applications. Experimental results indicate that our solution outperforms all traditional smart contract auditing tools, offering higher accuracy and greater efficiency. Furthermore, our framework can detect complex logic vulnerabilities that traditional tools have previously overlooked. Our findings demonstrate that leveraging LLM agents provides a highly effective method for automated smart contract auditing.

cs.CR

Survey on Quality Assurance of Smart Contracts

With the increasing adoption of smart contracts, ensuring their security has become a critical concern. Numerous vulnerabilities and attacks have been identified and exploited, resulting in significant financial losses. In response, researchers have developed various tools and techniques to identify and prevent vulnerabilities in smart contracts. In this survey, we present a systematic overview of the quality assurance of smart contracts, covering vulnerabilities, attacks, defenses, and tool support. By classifying vulnerabilities based on known attacks, we can identify patterns and common weaknesses that need to be addressed. Moreover, in order to effectively protect smart contracts, we have created a labeled dataset to evaluate various vulnerability detection tools and compare their effectiveness.

cs.CR