# Smart Contract Fuzzing Towards Profitable Vulnerabilities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08834 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08834/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2025.

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

- [AI Agent Smart Contract Exploit Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05558/) (2025)
- [PoCo: Agentic Proof-of-Concept Exploit Generation for Smart Contracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02780/) (2025)
- [Knowdit: Agentic Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection with Auditing Knowledge Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26270/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Billions of dollars are transacted through smart contracts, making vulnerabilities a major financial risk. One focus in the security arms race is on profitable vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Fuzzing is a key method for identifying these vulnerabilities. However, current solutions face two main limitations: a lack of profit-centric techniques for expediting detection, and insufficient automation in maximizing the profitability of discovered vulnerabilities, leaving the analysis to human experts. To address these gaps, we have developed VERITE, a profit-centric smart contract fuzzing framework that not only effectively detects those profitable vulnerabilities but also maximizes the exploited profits. VERITE has three key features: 1) DeFi action-based mutators for boosting the exploration of transactions with different fund flows; 2) potentially profitable candidates identification criteria, which checks whether the input has caused abnormal fund flow properties during testing; 3) a gradient descent-based profit maximization strategy for these identified candidates. VERITE is fully developed from scratch and evaluated on a dataset consisting of 61 exploited real-world DeFi projects with an average of over 1.1 million dollars loss. The results show that VERITE can automatically extract more than 18 million dollars in total and is significantly better than state-of-the-art fuzzer ITYFUZZ in both detection (29/10) and exploitation (134 times more profits gained on average). Remarkably, in 12 targets, it gains more profits than real-world attacking exploits (1.01 to 11.45 times more). VERITE is also applied by auditors in contract auditing, where 6 (5 high severity) zero-day vulnerabilities are found with over 2,500 bounty rewards.