MUMBAI, India, March 13 -- Intellectual Property India has published a patent application (202631014089 A) filed by C. V. Raman Global University, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, on Feb. 9, for 'system and method for automated detection and risk assessment of upgradeability vulnerabilities in decentralized finance smart contracts.'
Inventor(s) include Raj Vikram; Ashish Ranjan; Ravi Shankar Kumar; Ayushman Raj; Rittika Krishna Dhanwada; Neha Muduli; and Vikash Kumar.
The application for the patent was published on March 13, under issue no. 11/2026.
According to the abstract released by the Intellectual Property India: "Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols increasingly leverage upgradeable smart contracts to enable logic updates without full redeployment. However, upgradeability introduces critical security risks including unauthorized upgrades, proxy misconfiguration, compromised administrative privileges, re-initialization attacks, storage collision vulnerabilities, and malicious logic injection. Existing security tools predominantly rely on static analysis and fail to reliably detect upgradeability-specific vulnerabilities, particularly those emerging at runtime. This invention presents a hybrid static-runtime detection framework that integrates static program analysis with live on-chain storage verification using EIP-1967 specifications, proxy pattern fingerprinting, and opcode inspection. The system employs a structured multi-dimensional risk scoring mechanism that classifies upgradeability vulnerabilities into critical, high, medium, and low severity categories based on detected proxy patterns, access control mechanisms, and admin privilege configurations. Unlike existing tools that provide only surface-level detection or require complete source code access, this invention successfully identifies upgradeability risks in unverified contracts through runtime storage slot analysis and generates comprehensive, actionable security reports. The framework has been validated against real-world DeFi protocols including UUPS, Transparent, and Beacon proxy architectures, demonstrating superior detection accuracy and reduced false-positive rates. This solution enables protocol developers, auditors, and security researchers to systematically assess and mitigate upgradeability-related risks, protecting billions of dollars in locked value within the DeFi ecosystem."
Disclaimer: Curated by HT Syndication.
