SIF: A Framework for Solidity Code Instrumentation and Analysis

TL;DR

SIF is a comprehensive framework that enables Solidity smart contract analysis, instrumentation, and code generation, supporting developers in diagnostics, optimization, and understanding of contracts with practical tools tested on thousands of real contracts.

Contribution

The paper introduces SIF, a unified framework for Solidity contract analysis, instrumentation, and code generation, addressing the lack of integrated tools and workflows in this domain.

Findings

Successfully built tools on SIF and tested on 1838 real contracts.

Demonstrated feasibility and practical applicability of the framework.

Enhanced capabilities for Solidity contract diagnostics and optimization.

Abstract

Solidity is an object-oriented and high-level language for writing smart contracts that are used to execute, verify and enforce credible transactions on permissionless blockchains. In the last few years, analysis of smart contracts has raised considerable interest and numerous techniques have been proposed to check the presence of vulnerabilities in them. Current techniques lack traceability in source code and have widely differing work flows. There is no single unifying framework for analysis, instrumentation, optimisation and code generation of Solidity contracts. In this paper, we present SIF, a comprehensive framework for Solidity contract analysis, query, instrumentation, and code generation. SIF provides support for Solidity contract developers and testers to build source level techniques for analysis, understanding, diagnostics, optimisations and code generation. We show feasibility and applicability of the framework by building practical tools on top of it and running them on 1838 real smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum network.