Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning
Enhancing Smart Contract Security Through Obfuscation: Verification via Control Flow Graph Analysis
Authors: Karishma Yadav and Smita Naval
Publishing Date: 23-04-2025
ISBN: 978-81-975670-5-6
Abstract
Ethereum smart contracts leverage blockchain technology to facilitate the transfer of values directly between participants on a network, eliminating the need for a central authority. These contracts are deployed on decentralized applications that operate on top of the blockchain. By doing so, they provide individuals with the ability to create agreements in a transparent and secure environment, minimizing conflicts and promoting trust. It has been observed that there are bugs in the smart contract’s codes as these are provided by various programmers across the globe. The attackers exploit these security loopholes and pose a significant threat to applications, which subsequently result in financial losses to users. Discovering vulnerability in each contract is an important but time-consuming task. Therefore, we require to provide a security layer to each smart-contract such that it will make the exploitation a bit difficult task for attackers. The use of encryption and obfuscation techniques improves the security layer. The main focus of this research is source code obfuscation, which can increase security by up to 75%. The code obfuscation in security is mainly used by attackers to hide their malicious intent. We, in this approach suggest this method for increasing the complexity of smart contracts so that these cannot be exploited easily. We evaluate the impact of adding security layer to smart contract. The evaluation was done with various static and dynamic tools that identify the vulnerability in smart contracts. We achieved promising results which show that Obfuscation technique enhances the security and complexity of codes up to 75% which are stored on public blockchain.
Keywords
Obfuscation, Blockchain, Smart contract, vulnerability, Control Flow Graph.
Cite as
Karishma Yadav and Smita Naval, "Enhancing Smart Contract Security Through Obfuscation: Verification via Control Flow Graph Analysis", In: Sandeep Kumar and Kavita Sharma (eds), Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning, SCRS, India, 2025, pp. 57-84. https://doi.org/10.56155/978-81-975670-5-6-6