activity
20202026
most citedSmart Contract and DeFi Security Tools: Do They Meet the Needs of Practitioners?

59 citations · 259 across the 26 of their papers we have counts for

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Showing cs.CRShow all

19 papers · 1 filter

cs.CR2026

Transferable Self-Evolving Playbooks for Agentic Security Auditing

Ziyue Wang, Cheuk Wang Maurice Ng, Chenchen Yu +3

An LLM agent for vulnerability discovery and validation is more than a model. It combines three components: an LLM for code analysis, an agent harness such as Codex or OpenCode for…

cs.CR2026

TxRay: Agentic Postmortem of Live Blockchain Attacks

Ziyue Wang, Jiangshan Yu, Kaihua Qin +3

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has turned blockchains into financial infrastructure, allowing anyone to trade, lend, and build protocols without intermediaries, but this openness exp…

cs.CR2025

Agentic Discovery and Validation of Android App Vulnerabilities

Ziyue Wang, Liyi Zhou

Existing Android vulnerability detection tools overwhelm teams with thousands of low-signal warnings yet uncover few true positives. Analysts spend days triaging these results, cre…

cs.CR2025

Evasion Under Blockchain Sanctions

Endong Liu, Mark Ryan, Liyi Zhou +1

Sanctioning blockchain addresses has become a common regulatory response to malicious activities. However, enforcement on permissionless blockchains remains challenging due to comp…

cs.CR2025

AI Agent Smart Contract Exploit Generation

Arthur Gervais, Liyi Zhou

Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to billions in losses, yet finding actionable exploits remains challenging. Traditional fuzzers rely on rigid heuristics and struggle with c…

cs.CR2025

Decompiling Smart Contracts with a Large Language Model

Isaac David, Liyi Zhou, Dawn Song +2

The widespread lack of broad source code verification on blockchain explorers such as Etherscan, where despite 78,047,845 smart contracts deployed on Ethereum (as of May 26, 2025),…

cs.CR2024

Blockchain Amplification Attack

Taro Tsuchiya, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +2

Strategies related to the blockchain concept of Extractable Value (MEV/BEV), such as arbitrage, front-, or back-running create strong economic incentives for network nodes to reduc…

cs.CR2023★ 21 cited

Do you still need a manual smart contract audit?

Isaac David, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +3

We investigate the feasibility of employing large language models (LLMs) for conducting the security audit of smart contracts, a traditionally time-consuming and costly process. Ou…

cs.CR2023★ 1 cited

Blockchain Censorship

Anton Wahrstätter, Jens Ernstberger, Aviv Yaish +8

Permissionless blockchains promise to be resilient against censorship by a single entity. This suggests that deterministic rules, and not third-party actors, are responsible for de…

cs.CR2023★ 2 cited

Enhancing Smart Contract Security Analysis with Execution Property Graphs

Kaihua Qin, Zhe Ye, Zhun Wang +5

Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to significant financial losses, with their increasing complexity rendering outright prevention of hacks increasingly challenging. This tren…

cs.CR2023★ 15 cited

Blockchain Large Language Models

Yu Gai, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin +2

This paper presents a dynamic, real-time approach to detecting anomalous blockchain transactions. The proposed tool, BlockGPT, generates tracing representations of blockchain activ…

cs.CR2023★ 59 cited

Smart Contract and DeFi Security Tools: Do They Meet the Needs of Practitioners?

Stefanos Chaliasos, Marcos Antonios Charalambous, Liyi Zhou +4

The growth of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem built on blockchain technology and smart contracts has led to an increased demand for secure and reliable smart contract de…

cs.CR2022★ 5 cited

SoK: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Attacks

Liyi Zhou, Xihan Xiong, Jens Ernstberger +7

Within just four years, the blockchain-based Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem has accumulated a peak total value locked (TVL) of more than 253 billion USD. This surge in DeFi…

cs.CR2022★ 5 cited

On How Zero-Knowledge Proof Blockchain Mixers Improve, and Worsen User Privacy

Zhipeng Wang, Stefanos Chaliasos, Kaihua Qin +5

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) mixers are one of the most widely-used blockchain privacy solutions, operating on top of smart contract-enabled blockchains. We find that ZKP mixers are…

cs.CR2021★ 26 cited

A2MM: Mitigating Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges

Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Arthur Gervais

The asset trading volume on blockchain-based exchanges (DEX) increased substantially since the advent of Automated Market Makers (AMM). Yet, AMMs and their forks compete on the sam…

cs.CR2021★ 5 cited

On the Just-In-Time Discovery of Profit-Generating Transactions in DeFi Protocols

Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Antoine Cully +2

In this paper, we investigate two methods that allow us to automatically create profitable DeFi trades, one well-suited to arbitrage and the other applicable to more complicated se…

cs.CR2021★ 33 cited

Quantifying Blockchain Extractable Value: How dark is the forest?

Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Arthur Gervais

Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have excelled at financial services. Yet, opportunistic traders extract monetary value from the mesh of decentralized finance (DeFi) smar…

cs.CR2020★ 29 cited

High-Frequency Trading on Decentralized On-Chain Exchanges

Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Christof Ferreira Torres +2

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) allow parties to participate in financial markets while retaining full custody of their funds. However, the transparency of blockchain-based DEX in c…

cs.CR2020★ 41 cited

Attacking the DeFi Ecosystem with Flash Loans for Fun and Profit

Kaihua Qin, Liyi Zhou, Benjamin Livshits +1

Credit allows a lender to loan out surplus capital to a borrower. In the traditional economy, credit bears the risk that the borrower may default on its debt, the lender hence requ…