E-Guard: a vulnerability detection tool for smart contracts in electric power systems
Feng Du, Junwei Ma, Liang Gu, Honglin Xue, Xiaowei Hao, Xin Gong, Rongsheng Li · Blockchain Research and Applications · 2025
The application of smart contracts in electric power systems is widespread. However, vulnerabilities in smart contracts can cause significant economic losses and require careful attention. Smart contracts in electric power systems have domain-specific characteristics that differ from traditional public blockchain applications. As a result, existing vulnerability detection tools cannot be directly applied to these systems. To address this challenge, we design a vulnerability detection tool called E-Guard specifically for smart contracts in electric power systems. E-Guard uses a tailored intermediate representation (IR) known as EIR, which provides control flow and data flow information more suited to the business logic of electric power systems than traditional static analysis tools. We identify and summarize three types of vulnerabilities unique to electric power systems based on expert knowledge. Experimental results show that E-Guard significantly outperforms traditional static analysis tools in detecting these three types of vulnerabilities. Additionally, the extra overhead generated by using EIR is minimal and negligible. This demonstrates that E-Guard is an effective and efficient tool for enhancing the security of smart contracts in electric power systems.