ContractTrace: Retracing Smart Contract Versions for Security Analyses
Fatou Ndiaye Mbodji, Vinny Adjibi, Moustapha Awwalou Diouf, Gervais Mendy, Kui Liu, Jacques Klein, and Tegawende Bissyande

TL;DR
ContractTrace is an automated tool that reconstructs smart contract version histories on blockchains, enabling security researchers to analyze vulnerability lifecycles and assess security patch effectiveness across contract versions.
Contribution
The paper introduces ContractTrace, a novel system for accurately tracing smart contract lineages, filling a critical gap in security analysis tools for blockchain environments.
Findings
ContractTrace successfully links contract versions into coherent lineages.
The tool reveals previously hidden vulnerability propagation patterns.
Validation confirms high accuracy of the lineage detection methodology.
Abstract
Due to the inherent immutability of blockchain technology, smart contract updates require their deployment at new addresses rather than modifying existing ones, thus fragmenting version histories and creating critical blind spots for analyses. Indeed, for example, this fragmentation severely hinders security researchers ability to track vulnerability lifecycles across contract versions. While platforms like Etherscan provide detailed information about Ethereum smart contracts, they lack crucial functionality to trace predecessor-successor relationships within smart contract lineages, preventing systematic analysis of how vulnerabilities emerge, propagate, and potentially remain unresolved across versions.To address the challenge of tracing smart contract lineages, we adopt a Design Science Research (DSR) approach and introduce ContractTrace, an automated infrastructure that accurately…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInsurance and Financial Risk Management · Auction Theory and Applications · Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization
