With the increase of the adoption of blockchain technology in providing
decentralized solutions to various problems, smart contracts have become more
popular to the point that billions of US Dollars are currently exchanged every
day through such technology. Meanwhile, various vulnerabilities in smart
contracts have been exploited by attackers to steal cryptocurrencies worth
millions of dollars. The automatic detection of smart contract vulnerabilities
therefore is an essential research problem. Existing solutions to this problem
particularly rely on human experts to define features or different rules to
detect vulnerabilities. However, this often causes many vulnerabilities to be
ignored, and they are inefficient in detecting new vulnerabilities. In this
study, to overcome such challenges, we propose a framework to automatically
detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts on the blockchain. More specifically,
first, we utilize novel feature vector generation techniques from bytecode of
smart contract since the source code of smart contracts are rarely available in
public. Next, the collected vectors are fed into our novel metric
learning-based deep neural network(DNN) to get the detection result. We conduct
comprehensive experiments on large-scale benchmarks, and the quantitative
results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach