STAN: Towards Describing Bytecodes of Smart Contract

TL;DR

STAN is a novel system that generates detailed, accurate, and readable natural language descriptions of smart contract bytecodes, aiding user understanding of contract functionalities and mechanisms.

Contribution

This paper introduces STAN, the first system to generate semantic descriptions of smart contract bytecodes using symbolic execution and NLP techniques.

Findings

STAN produces accurate and readable descriptions.

The system demonstrates practical value for user comprehension.

Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of STAN.

Abstract

More than eight million smart contracts have been deployed into Ethereum, which is the most popular blockchain that supports smart contract. However, less than 1% of deployed smart contracts are open-source, and it is difficult for users to understand the functionality and internal mechanism of those closed-source contracts. Although a few decompilers for smart contracts have been recently proposed, it is still not easy for users to grasp the semantic information of the contract, not to mention the potential misleading due to decompilation errors. In this paper, we propose the first system named STAN to generate descriptions for the bytecodes of smart contracts to help users comprehend them. In particular, for each interface in a smart contract, STAN can generate four categories of descriptions, including functionality description, usage description, behavior description, and payment description, by leveraging symbolic execution and NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques. Extensive experiments show that STAN can generate adequate, accurate, and readable descriptions for contract's bytecodes, which have practical value for users.