PoCo: Agentic Proof-of-Concept Exploit Generation for Smart Contracts

arXiv:2511.02780v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Smart contracts operate in a highly adversarial environment, where vulnerabilities can lead to substantial financial losses. Thus, smart contracts are subject to security audits. In auditing, proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits play a critical role by demonstrating to the stakeholders that the reported vulnerabilities are genuine, reproducible, and actionable. However, manually creating PoCs is time-consuming, error-prone, and often constrained by tight audit schedules. We introduce POCO, an agentic framework that automatically generates executable PoC exploits from natural-language vulnerability descriptions written by auditors. POCO autonomously generates PoC exploits in an agentic manner by interacting with a set of code-execution tools in a Reason-Act-Observe loop. It produces fully executable exploits compatible with the Foundry testing framework, ready for integration into audit reports and other security tools. We evaluate POCO on a dataset of 23 real-world vulnerability reports. POCO consistently outperforms the prompting and workflow baselines, generating well-formed and logically correct PoCs. Our results demonstrate that agentic frameworks can significantly reduce the effort required for high-quality PoCs in smart contract audits. Our contribution provides readily actionable knowledge for the smart contract security community.