Ethereum Intrusion Detection based on Bi-LSTM with Multi-head Attention

Abstract

Developers and users are drawn to Ethereum due to its rapidly growing asset count. However, potential vulnerabilities and malicious behaviors during the execution of smart contracts have led to an increasing demand for security detection technology. Conventional static and dynamic analysis methods are less useful in the case of complex opcode sequences and multiple execution paths. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes an Ethereum intrusion detection method based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network with multi-head attention. It examines the opcode execution paths generated from the intra-and-inter-function Control Flow Graphs (CFGs) using the EPP algorithm and captures the rich feature representations and long dependencies. This combination increases the precision and efficacy of detecting malicious activity and smart contract vulnerabilities while simultaneously enhancing the model’s robustness and interpretability and handling variable-length sequences. For the five selected vulnerabilities, the precision, recall and F1-score of this model are above 89.9%, 87.3%, and 88%, respectively.