# JANUS: A Difference-Oriented Analyzer For Financial Centralization Risks in Smart Contracts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03938 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03938/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Devign: Effective Vulnerability Identification by Learning Comprehensive Program Semantics via Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03496/) (2019)
- [Slither: A Static Analysis Framework For Smart Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09878/) (2019)
- [GPTScan: Detecting Logic Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts by Combining GPT with Program Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03314/) (2023)
- [Securify: Practical Security Analysis of Smart Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01143/) (2018)
- [When ChatGPT Meets Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection: How Far Are We?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05520/) (2023)
- [Combining Graph Neural Networks with Expert Knowledge for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11598/) (2021)
- [ContractFuzzer: Fuzzing Smart Contracts for Vulnerability Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03932/) (2018)
- [Finding The Greedy, Prodigal, and Suicidal Contracts at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06038/) (2018)
- [Behavior-aware Account De-anonymization on Ethereum Interaction Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09360/) (2022)
- [Token Spammers, Rug Pulls, and SniperBots: An Analysis of the Ecosystem of Tokens in Ethereum and in the Binance Smart Chain (BNB)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08202/) (2022)
- [eThor: Practical and Provably Sound Static Analysis of Ethereum Smart Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06227/) (2020)
- [SoK: Comprehensive Analysis of Rug Pull Causes, Datasets, and Detection Tools in DeFi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16082/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Some smart contracts violate decentralization principles by defining privileged accounts that manage other users' assets without permission, introducing centralization risks that have caused financial losses. Existing methods, however, face challenges in accurately detecting diverse centralization risks due to their dependence on predefined behavior patterns. In this paper, we propose JANUS, an automated analyzer for Solidity smart contracts that detects financial centralization risks independently of their specific behaviors. JANUS identifies differences between states reached by privileged and ordinary accounts, and analyzes whether these differences are finance-related. Focusing on the impact of risks rather than behaviors, JANUS achieves improved accuracy compared to existing tools and can uncover centralization risks with unknown patterns. To evaluate JANUS's performance, we compare it with other tools using a dataset of 540 contracts. Our evaluation demonstrates that JANUS outperforms representative tools in terms of detection accuracy for financial centralization risks . Additionally, we evaluate JANUS on a real-world dataset of 33,151 contracts, successfully identifying two types of risks that other tools fail to detect. We also prove that the state traversal method and variable summaries, which are used in JANUS to reduce the number of states to be compared, do not introduce false alarms or omissions in detection.