Advanced Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection via LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Systems
Open accessAbstract
Blockchain’s inherent immutability, while transformative, creates critical security risks in smart contracts, where undetected vulnerabilities can result in irreversible financial losses. Current auditing tools and approaches often address specific vulnerability types, yet there is a need for a comprehensive solution that can detect a wide range of vulnerabilities with high accuracy. We propose LLM-SmartAudit, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate smart contract vulnerability detection and analysis. Using a multi-agent conversational architecture with a buffer-of-thought mechanism, LLM-SmartAudit maintains a dynamic record of insights generated throughout the audit process. This enables a collaborative system of specialized agents to iteratively refine their assessments, enhancing the accuracy and depth of vulnerability detection. To evaluate its effectiveness, LLM-SmartAudit was tested on three datasets: a benchmark for common vulnerabilities, a real-world project corpus, and a CVE dataset. It outperformed existing tools with 98% accuracy on common vulnerabilities and demonstrates higher accuracy in real-world scenarios. Additionally, it successfully identifies 12 out of 13 CVEs, surpassing other LLM-based methods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-agent collaboration in automated smart contract auditing, offering a scalable, adaptive, and highly efficient solution for blockchain security analysis.
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Multi-agent smart-contract auditors now match or exceed expert auditors on standard benchmarks.
“Multi-agent smart-contract auditors [119,121-123,125] now match or exceed expert auditors on standard benchmarks.”
From Agentic AI and Large Language Models for Autonomous IoT Cybersecurity: A Systematic Survey, Taxonomy, and Research Roadmap (2026) · cites this paper as [125]
Across the full 153-paper corpus, only five studies report observing a compound failure mode at all.
“across the full 153-paper corpus, only five studies (≈3%)- [22,71,125] for error propagation and [26,87] for tool-use amplification-report observing a compound failure mode at all”
From Agentic AI and Large Language Models for Autonomous IoT Cybersecurity: A Systematic Survey, Taxonomy, and Research Roadmap (2026) · cites this paper as [125]
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References 29 · Cited by 31
- Authors
- Wei, Z., Sun, J., Sun, Y., Liu, Y., Wu, D., Zhang, Z., Zhang, X., Li, M., Liu, Y., Li, C., Wan, M., Dong, J., & Zhu, L.
- Affiliations
- Beijing Institute of Technology (CN)
- Nanyang Technological University (SG)
- Lingnan University (HK)
- Hefei University of Technology (CN)
- Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, Beijing, China
- University of Auckland (NZ)
- ORCID
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Published
- 2025-10
- Volume
- 51
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 2830-2846
- ISSN
- 0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-3520
- 2326-3881
- OpenAlex
- W4413188105
- Cited by
- 31
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 28 · 2025: 3
- FWCI
- 32.23
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- DR-NTU (Nanyang Technological University) (submittedVersion)
- Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFB2703700)
- Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing (GJJ-25-002)
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (62372149, U23A20303, 62372173)
- China Scholarship Council
- Key Laboratory of Knowledge Engineering with Big Data (BigKEOpen2025-04)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Software › Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Keywords
- smart contract vulnerability detection, blockchain security, large language models, multi-agent systems, chatbots
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