The Deception Delta: Adversarial Evaluation of LLM-Based Smart Contract Bytecode Forensics

Large language models are increasingly used in blockchain forensic investigations to interpret unverified smart contract bytecode. Their robustness has not been systematically tested against contracts adversarially designed to mislead analysis.

We evaluate 22 frontier models on 13 purpose-built contracts (9 deception vectors, 4 controls) across six prompt strategies, yielding 8,528 analyzable non-refusal runs against contracts with EVMverified ground truth. A calibrated LLM-as-judge pipeline, supported by two judge-independent metrics and 50 human goldstandard labels, shows that adversarial deception reduces drain detection by 20.0 percentage points (95% CI: [17.2, 22.8]) relative to functionally matched controls.

Structural camouflage via multi-hop call chains, XOR-masked selectors, and storage-loaded drain parameters resists detection across nearly all models. Beyond non-detection, we identify rationalization: models correctly describe the hidden drain mechanism but accept the contract's deceptive framing and dismiss it as benign, yielding positive but incorrect evidence of safety. Simple guard instructions provide no aggregate benefit and destabilize individual models in both directions.

Structural deception is largely insensitive across the six tested prompt strategies, more consistent with a capability limitation than with a simple prompting problem. Only five models from two providers exceed 50% detection.

Under our single-shot, raw-bytecode-only protocol, current LLMs are not reliable standalone forensic tools. Our central claim does not extend to multi-turn, tool-augmented, source-aware, or decompiler-in-the-loop workflows; a source-code boundary check is reported as an explicit subset analysis rather than as part of the main evaluation.