Anomaly Detection System for Ethereum Blockchain Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Over the past few years, Blockchain technology has been utilized in various applications to improve privacy and security. Although blockchain has proven its worth as a very powerful technology, research has shown that it is not entirely immune to security and privacy attacks. There was a successful 51% attack on Ethereum Classic back in January 2019 which shows that blockchain still facing security and privacy challenges. This paper aims to develop an anomaly detection solution for the Ethereum blockchain to overcome security challenges using Machine Learning (ML). The proposed solution focuses on using a dynamic approach where the normal operational behaviour of the Ethereum blockchain is used to train ML algorithms and any deviation will be tagged as an anomaly and will be detected by the system. Four ML algorithms including K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GaussianNB), Random Forest, and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SDG) were utilized to train and verify the accuracy of the proposed solution. The experimental results demonstrated that the random forest algorithm provided the best accuracy of 99.84% over other ML algorithms.