Reentrancy Detection in the Age of LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ressi, Dalila, Spanò, Alvise, Rizzo, Matteo, Benetollo, Lorenzo, Rossi, Sabina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ressi, Dalila
Spanò, Alvise
Rizzo, Matteo
Benetollo, Lorenzo
Rossi, Sabina
author_facet Ressi, Dalila
Spanò, Alvise
Rizzo, Matteo
Benetollo, Lorenzo
Rossi, Sabina
contents Reentrancy remains one of the most critical classes of vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts, yet widely used detection tools and datasets continue to reflect outdated patterns and obsolete Solidity versions. This paper adopts a dependability-oriented perspective on reentrancy detection in Solidity 0.8+, assessing how reliably state-of-the-art static analyzers and AI-based techniques operate on modern code by putting them to the test on two fronts. We construct two manually verified benchmarks: an Aggregated Benchmark of 432 real-world contracts, consolidated and relabeled from prior datasets, and a Reentrancy Scenarios Dataset (RSD) of \chadded{143} handcrafted minimal working examples designed to isolate and stress-test individual reentrancy patterns. We then evaluate 12 formal-methods-based tools, 10 machine-learning models, and 9 large language models. On the Aggregated Benchmark, traditional tools and ML models achieve up to 0.87 F1, while the best LLMs reach 0.96 in a zero-shot setting. On the RSD, most tools fail on multiple scenarios, the top performer achieving an F1 of 0.76, whereas the strongest model attains 0.82. Overall, our results indicate that leading LLMs outperform the majority of existing detectors, highlighting concerning gaps in the robustness and maintainability of current reentrancy-analysis tools.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26497
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reentrancy Detection in the Age of LLMs
Ressi, Dalila
Spanò, Alvise
Rizzo, Matteo
Benetollo, Lorenzo
Rossi, Sabina
Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
Reentrancy remains one of the most critical classes of vulnerabilities in Ethereum smart contracts, yet widely used detection tools and datasets continue to reflect outdated patterns and obsolete Solidity versions. This paper adopts a dependability-oriented perspective on reentrancy detection in Solidity 0.8+, assessing how reliably state-of-the-art static analyzers and AI-based techniques operate on modern code by putting them to the test on two fronts. We construct two manually verified benchmarks: an Aggregated Benchmark of 432 real-world contracts, consolidated and relabeled from prior datasets, and a Reentrancy Scenarios Dataset (RSD) of \chadded{143} handcrafted minimal working examples designed to isolate and stress-test individual reentrancy patterns. We then evaluate 12 formal-methods-based tools, 10 machine-learning models, and 9 large language models. On the Aggregated Benchmark, traditional tools and ML models achieve up to 0.87 F1, while the best LLMs reach 0.96 in a zero-shot setting. On the RSD, most tools fail on multiple scenarios, the top performer achieving an F1 of 0.76, whereas the strongest model attains 0.82. Overall, our results indicate that leading LLMs outperform the majority of existing detectors, highlighting concerning gaps in the robustness and maintainability of current reentrancy-analysis tools.
title Reentrancy Detection in the Age of LLMs
topic Cryptography and Security
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26497