Front-running Attack Detection in Blockchain using Conditional Packing Generative AI

Abstract

Detecting front-running attacks in Ethereum blockchain transactions is crucial for maintaining security and integrity within decentralized ecosystems. However, existing models struggle to accurately model the complex distributions inherent in tabular data, particularly in the presence of class imbalance and mode collapse. This paper leverages the potentials of Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Networks and PacGAN, called a Conditional Packing GAN (cPacGAN), to address these challenges. cPacGAN effectively generates synthetic data that closely mimics the distribution of real transactions, thereby augmenting the dataset and improving the performance of front-running attack detection. PacGAN mitigates mode collapse by incorporating packed samples in the discriminator, improving the diversity of generated samples and improving the stability of the training process. Through experimental evaluations of a real-world Ethereum transactions dataset, cPacGAN demonstrates improved performance across all selected machine learning classifiers, particularly augmenting the effectiveness of Tabular Neural Networks (TabNet).