Over the last few years, there has been substantial research on automated analysis, testing, and debugging of Ethereum smart contracts. However, it is not trivial to compare and reproduce that research. To address this, we present an empirical evaluation of 9 state-of-theart automated analysis tools using two new datasets: i) a dataset of 69 annotated vulnerable smart contracts that can be used to evaluate the precision of analysis tools; and ii) a dataset with all the smart contracts in the Ethereum Blockchain that have Solidity source code available on Etherscan (a total of 47,518 contracts). The datasets are part of SmartBugs, a new extendable execution framework that we created to facilitate the integration and comparison between multiple analysis tools and the analysis of Ethereum smart contracts. We used SmartBugs to execute the 9 automated analysis tools on the two datasets. In total, we ran 428,337 analyses that took approximately 564 days and 3 hours, being the largest experimental setup to date both in the number of tools and in execution time. We found that only 42% of the vulnerabilities from our annotated dataset are detected by all the tools, with the tool Mythril having the higher accuracy (27%). When considering the largest dataset, we observed that 97% of contracts are tagged as vulnerable, thus suggesting a considerable number of false positives. Indeed, only a small number of vulnerabilities (and of only two categories) were detected simultaneously by four or more tools.

Over the last few years, there has been substantial research on automated analysis, testing, and debugging of Ethereum smart contracts. However, it is not trivial to compare and reproduce that research. To address this, we present SmartBugs, an extensible and easy-to-use execution framework that simplifies the execution of analysis tools on smart contracts written in Solidity, the primary language used in Ethereum. SmartBugs is currently distributed with support for 10 tools and two datasets of Solidity contracts. The first dataset can be used to evaluate the precision of analysis tools, as it contains 143 annotated vulnerable contracts with 208 tagged vulnerabilities. The second dataset contains 47,518 unique contracts collected through Etherscan. We discuss how SmartBugs supported the largest experimental setup to date both in the number of tools and in execution time. Moreover, we show how it enables easy integration and comparison of analysis tools by presenting a new extension to the tool SmartCheck that improves substantially the detection of vulnerabilities related to the DASP10 categories Bad Randomness, Time Manipulation, and Access Control(identified vulnerabilities increased from 11% to 24%).