Evaluation of LLMs in Detecting Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22481/recic.v8i1.18263Keywords:
smart contracts, LLMs, blockchain, security, vulnerabilitiesAbstract
Smart contract auditing is essential to ensure the security of decentralized applications, preventing critical failures in immutable environments such as blockchains. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the automated detection of vulnerabilities in smart contracts. To this end, 40 contracts from different categories were analyzed by four LLMs — GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, Llama-3.3, and Gemini 2.0 Flash — using a unified prompt to extract and classify vulnerabilities by severity. Performance was measured using precision, recall, F1-score, and mean absolute error, comparing the detected vulnerabilities with reference audits. The best-performing model achieved 10.36% precision and 22.48% recall, indicating that LLMs still require improvements for reliable autonomous use.
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