An Effective and Cost-Efficient Agentic Framework for Ethereum Smart Contract Auditing

TL;DR

Heimdallr is an automated, cost-effective agentic framework for Ethereum smart contract auditing that leverages function-level code organization, heuristic reasoning, and cascaded verification to detect vulnerabilities efficiently and accurately.

Contribution

The paper introduces Heimdallr, a novel automated auditing framework that overcomes limitations of existing methods by combining code restructuring, heuristic vulnerability detection, and verification, achieving high accuracy with lightweight models.

Findings

Successfully reconstructed 17 out of 20 recent real-world attacks.

Uncovered 4 zero-day vulnerabilities preventing $400M losses.

Reduced analysis time by up to 97.59% and costs by 98.77% compared to baselines.

Abstract

Smart contract security is paramount, but identifying intricate business logic vulnerabilities remains a persistent challenge because existing solutions consistently fall short: manual auditing is unscalable, static analysis tools are plagued by false positives, and fuzzers struggle to navigate deep logic states within complex systems. Even emerging AI-based methods suffer from hallucinations, context constraints, and a heavy reliance on expensive, proprietary Large Language Models. In this paper, we introduce Heimdallr, an automated auditing agent designed to overcome these hurdles through four core innovations. By reorganizing code at the function level, Heimdallr minimizes context overhead while preserving essential business logic. It then employs heuristic reasoning to detect complex vulnerabilities and automatically chain functional exploits. Finally, a cascaded verification layer validates these findings to eliminate false positives. Notably, this approach achieves high performance on lightweight, open-source models like GPToss-120B without relying on proprietary systems. Our evaluations demonstrate exceptional performance, as Heimdallr successfully reconstructed 17 out of 20 real-world attacks post June 2025, resulting in total losses of $384M, and uncovered 4 confirmed zero-day vulnerabilities that safeguarded $400M in TVL. Compared to SOTA baselines including both official industrial tools and academic tools, Heimdallr at most reduces analysis time by 97.59% and financial costs by 98.77% while boosting detection precision by over 93.66%. Notably, when applied to auditing contests, Heimdallr can achieve a 92.45% detection rate at a negligible cost of $2.31 per 10K LOC. We provide production-ready auditing services and release valuable benchmarks for future work.