Graph-based Contract Sensing Framework for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Smart contract vulnerabilities have led to significant economic losses, threatening blockchain security and development. Graph neural network (GNN)-based approaches, which capture the structural properties of contracts and leverage code dependencies to better understand contract behavior, have become widely used for vulnerability detection. However, these approaches face challenges in losing valuable information during graph construction and failing to capture rich semantic content, while traditional GNNs struggle with long-range dependencies and global context in complex contract graphs. To address these challenges, we propose ConSense, a GNN-based Contract Sensing Framework for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection. ConSense comprises two core components: the smart contract graph generator, which constructs contract graphs while retaining both structural and semantic information, and ExploreFormer, which effectively integrates local and global context using advanced attention mechanisms for vulnerability detection. Comprehensive experimental evaluations were performed on the IR-ESCD and SCVHunter-SCD datasets. For instance, the IR-ESCD benchmark—which encompasses eight distinct vulnerability categories—demonstrates that ConSense attains an average detection accuracy of 97.74%, with a mean processing time of 0.648 seconds per contract. These results signify a statistically significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods in both precision and computational efficiency.