Ethereum Smart Contract Analysis Benchmarking

This repository contains a set of benchmarks, a bench harness, and graph generation utilities that are intended to provide some kind of objective measurements for the strengths and weaknesses of various analysis tooling targeting Ethereum smart contracts. In practice this means tools that consume Solidity, Yul, or EVM bytecode.

The benchmarks in this repo should be useful to developers of all kinds of tools, including fuzzers, static analyzers, and symbolic execution engines.

Quick Start Guide -- Linux

Install nix (see here). Then:

# optional, but will make subsequent steps significantly faster
nix-shell -p cachix --command "cachix use k-framework"

nix develop   # this may take some time
./bench.py
./gen_graphs.py
cd graphs

You can look at the graphs under the folder graphs

Quick Start Guide -- Mac

You will need to create a docker image. This is because unfortunately MacOS does not support the procfs (i.e. /proc) and runlim does not work with sysctl. We suggest the following setup:

brew install colima
colima start
docker ps -a

If docker ps -a ran fine, then you can now create a docker image via:

docker build --tag sym-bench .
docker run -it --rm sym-bench
./bench.py
./gen_graphs.py

Using This Repository

We use Nix to provide a zero overhead reproducible environment that contains all tools required to run the benchmarks. If you want to add a new tool then you need to extend the flake.nix so that this tool is present in the devShell.

To enter the environment, run nix develop. Once you have a working shell, you can run python bench.py to execute the benchmarks. The results are collected in results.db sqlite3 database and the csv and json files results-[timestamp].csv/json. You can view these files using standard tools such as libreoffice, Excel, jq, etc.

To generate graphs, run python gen_graph.py. Then, you can look at the cumulative distribution function (CDF) graph to get an overview. Here, the different tools' performances are displayed, with X axis showing time, and the Y axis showing the number of problems solved within that time frame. Typically, a tool is be better when it solves more instances (i.e. higher on the Y axis) while being faster (i.e. more to the left on the X axis)

The system also generates one-on-one comparisons for all tested tools, and a box chart of all tools' performance on all instances.

Adding a New Benchmark

First, a note on benchmark selection. It is important to keep in mind that the set of benchmarks the tools are evaluated on significantly impacts which tool "looks" best on e.g. the CDF plot. For fairness, we strongly recommend contract authors to add interesting problems via pull requests. A problem can be interesting because e.g. it's often needed but generally slow to solve, or because some or even all tools could not solve it. This can help drive development of tools and ensure more fairness in the comparisons.

There are two types of benchmarks. The ones under src/safe/1tx-abstract and under src/unsafe/1tx-abstract are standard Solidity contracts that have all their functions checked to have triggerable assert statements. For these files, either the entire contract is deemed safe or unsafe. The files under src/safe/ds-test and under src/unsafe/ds-test are tested differently. Here, only functions starting with the prove keyword are tested, individually, for safety. Hence, each function may be individually deemed safe/unsafe. Contracts under these directories can use the full set of foundry cheatcodes and assertion helpers.

An example 1tx benchmark is below. It would be under src/unsafe/1tx-abstract since the assert can be triggered with x=10.

contract C {
    function f(uint256 x) public {
      assert(x != 10);
    }
}

An example ds-test benchmark is below. It would be under src/unsafe/ds-test since the assert can be triggered with x=11.

contract C {
    function prove_f(uint256 x) public {
      assert(x != 11);
    }
}

Execution Environments

Currently, there is a global 25 second wall clock timeout applied to all tool invocations. This is adjustable with the -t option to bench.py. Tools that take longer than this to produce a result for a benchmark will have an "unknown" result assigned. There is currently no memory limit enforced.

Each tool is allowed to use as many threads as it wishes, typically auto-detected by each tool to be the number of cores in the system. This means that the execution environment may have an impact on the results. Tools that are e.g. single-threaded may seem to perform better in environments with few cores, while the reverse may be the case for tools with a high level of parallelism and an execution environment with 128+ cores.

Adding a New Tool

In order to include a tool in this repository, you should add a script for that tool under tools/<tool_name>.sh. You will also need to add a script tools/<tool_name>_version.sh. Then, add a line to bench.py that explains to the script how your tool is used.

Your main shell script should output:

"safe": if the contract contains no reachable assertion violations
"unsafe": if the contract contains at least one reachable assertion violation
"unknown": if the tool was unable to determine whether a reachable assertion violation is present

Before executing the benchmarks, forge build is invoked on all Solidity files in the repository, and tools that operate on EVM bytecode can read the compiled bytecode directly from the respective build outputs.

Check out the examples for hevm and halmos in the repository for examples. Note that in order for others to run your tool, it needs to be added to flake.nix.

eth-sc-comp/benchmarks