Arthur Gervais
Arthur Gervais is a Professor of Information Security at UCL focused on building AI systems for practical security applications. His research spans the use of modern machine learning (including large language models) for vulnerability discovery, remediation, blockchain and smart-contract security and program analysis. Arthur values the broad dissemination of teaching material, defi-learning.org, and pushed the first DeFi course at ETH Zurich.
Session
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has turned blockchains into financial infrastructure, allowing anyone to trade, lend, and build protocols without intermediaries, but this openness exposes pools of value controlled by code. Within five years, the DeFi ecosystem has lost over 15.75B USD to reported exploits. Many exploits arise from permissionless opportunities that any participant can trigger using only public state and standard interfaces, which we call Anyone-Can-Take (ACT) opportunities. Despite on-chain transparency, postmortem analysis remains slow and manual: investigations start from limited evidence, sometimes only a single transaction hash, and must reconstruct the exploit lifecycle by recovering related transactions, contract code, and state dependencies.
We present ClaraHacks, a Large Language Model (LLM) agentic postmortem system that uses tool calls to reconstruct live ACT attacks from limited evidence. Starting from one or more seed transactions, ClaraHacks recovers the exploit lifecycle, derives an evidence-backed root cause, and generates a runnable, self-contained Proof of Concept (PoC) that deterministically reproduces the incident. ClaraHacks self-checks postmortems by encoding incident-specific semantic oracles as executable assertions.
To evaluate PoC correctness and quality, we develop PoCEvaluator, an independent agentic execution-and-review evaluator. On 114 incidents from DeFiHackLabs, ClaraHacks produces an expert-aligned root cause and an executable PoC for 105 incidents, achieving 92.11% end-to-end reproduction. Under PoCEvaluator, 98.1% of ClaraHacks PoCs avoid hard-coding attacker addresses, a +22.9pp lift over DeFiHackLabs. In a live deployment, ClaraHacks delivers validated root causes in 40 minutes and PoCs in 59 minutes at median latency. ClaraHacks's oracle-validated PoCs enable attack imitation, improving coverage by 15.6% and 65.5% over STING and APE.
Academic paper with all technical details: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01317
