Smart contracts written in Solidity are widely used in different
blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, TRON and BNB Chain.
One of the unique designs in Solidity smart contracts is its statereverting
mechanism for error handling and access control. Unfortunately,
a number of recent security incidents showed that
adversaries also utilize this mechanism to manipulate critical states
of smart contracts, and hence, bring security consequences such as
illegal profit-gain and Deny-of-Service (DoS). In this paper, we call
such vulnerabilities as the State-reverting Vulnerability (SRV). Automatically
identifying SRVs poses unique challenges, as it requires
an in-depth analysis and understanding of the state-dependency
relations in smart contracts.

This paper presents SmartState, a new framework for detecting
state-reverting vulnerability in Solidity smart contracts via finegrained
state-dependency analysis. SmartState integrates a set of
novel mechanisms to ensure its effectiveness. Particularly, Smart-
State extracts state dependencies from both contract bytecode and
historical transactions. Both of them are critical for inferring dependencies
related to SRVs. Further, SmartState models the generic
patterns of SRVs (i.e., profit-gain and DoS) as SRV indicators, and
hence effectively identify SRVs based on the constructed statedependency
graph. To evaluate SmartState, we manually annotated
a ground-truth dataset which contains 91 SRVs in the real world.
Evaluation results showed that SmartState achieves a precision of
87.23% and a recall of 89.13%. In addition, SmartState successfully
identifies 406 new SRVs from 47,351 real-world smart contracts. 11
of these SRVs are from popular smart contracts with high transaction
amounts (i.e., top 2000). In total, our reported SRVs affect a
total amount of digital assets worth 428,600 USD.