# EthIR: A Framework for High-Level Analysis of Ethereum Bytecode

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07208/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Blockchain Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12749/) (2023)
- [Who is Gambling? Finding Cryptocurrency Gamblers Using Multi-modal Retrieval Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14779/) (2022)
- [Multi-Agent Collaborative Fuzzing with Continuous Reflection for Smart Contracts Vulnerability Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12164/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Analyzing Ethereum bytecode, rather than the source code from which it was generated, is a necessity when: (1) the source code is not available (e.g., the blockchain only stores the bytecode), (2) the information to be gathered in the analysis is only visible at the level of bytecode (e.g., gas consumption is specified at the level of EVM instructions), (3) the analysis results may be affected by optimizations performed by the compiler (thus the analysis should be done ideally after compilation). This paper presents EthIR, a framework for analyzing Ethereum bytecode, which relies on (an extension of) OYENTE, a tool that generates CFGs; EthIR produces from the CFGs, a rule-based representation (RBR) of the bytecode that enables the application of (existing) high-level analyses to infer properties of EVM code.