Title
Guiding Automated Test Case Generation for Transaction-Reverting Statements in Smart Contracts
Author
Olsthoorn, Mitchell (TU Delft Software Engineering) 
van Deursen, A. (TU Delft Software Technology)
Panichella, A. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Contributor
Ceballos, Cristina (editor)
Department
Software Technology
Date
2022
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 %).
Subject
test case generation
smart contracts
search-based software engineering
fuzzing
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:fc4e2697-811d-495a-887c-172745fe33d2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00023
Publisher
IEEE, Piscataway
Embargo date
2023-07-01
ISBN
978-1-6654-7957-8
Source
2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
Event
2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution
, 2022-10-03 → 2022-10-07, Limassol, Cyprus
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
Part of collection
Institutional Repository
Document type
conference paper
Rights
© 2022 Mitchell Olsthoorn, A. van Deursen, A. Panichella