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A Bytecode-based Approach for Smart Contract Classification

2021/05/31 by Chaochen Shi, Yong Xiang, Shi, Chaochen +9 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Imbalanced Data Classification Techniques #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Machine Learning (cs.LG)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.15497

openalex publication_date 2021/05/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

With the development of blockchain technologies, the number of smart contracts deployed on blockchain platforms is growing exponentially, which makes it difficult for users to find desired services by manual screening. The automatic classification of smart contracts can provide blockchain users with keyword-based contract searching and helps to manage smart contracts effectively. Current research on smart contract classification focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions which are based on contract source code. However, more than 94% of smart contracts are not open-source, so the application scenarios of NLP methods are very limited. Meanwhile, NLP models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This paper proposes a classification model based on features from contract bytecode instead of source code to solve these problems. We also use feature selection and ensemble learning to optimize the model. Our experimental studies on over 3,300 real-world Ethereum smart contracts show that our model can classify smart contracts without source code and has better performance than baseline models. Our model also has good resistance to adversarial attacks compared with NLP-based models. In addition, our analysis reveals that account features used in many smart contract classification models have little effect on classification and can be excluded.

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