Blockchain Papers

Zhen Zhang, Tao He, Kai Chen, Boshen Zhang · 6 authors

As the use of digital currencies, such as cryptocurrencies, increases in popularity, phishing scams and other cybercriminal activities on blockchain platforms (e.g., Ethereum) have also risen. Current methods of detecting phishing in Ethereum focus mainly on the transaction features and local network structure. However, these methods fail to account for the complexity of interactions between edges and the handling of large graphs. Additionally, these methods face significant issues due to the limited number of positive labels available. Given this, we propose a scheme that we refer to as the Bagging Multiedge Graph Convolutional Network to detect phishing scams on Ethereum. First, we extract the features from transactions and transform the complex Ethereum transaction network into three simple inter-node graphs. Then, we use graph convolution to generate node embeddings that leverage the global structural information of the inter-node graphs. Further, we apply the bagging strategy to overcome the issues of data imbalance and the Positive Unlabeled (PU) problem in transaction data. Finally, to evaluate our approach’s effectiveness, we conduct experiments using actual transaction data. The results demonstrate that our Bagging Multiedge Graph Convolutional Network (0.877 AUC) outperforms all of the baseline classification methods in detecting phishing scams on Ethereum.

Wenjia Yu, Yijun Xia, Jieli Liu, Jiajing Wu

Phishing is a widespread scam activity on Ethereum, causing huge financial losses to victims. Most existing phishing scam detection methods abstract accounts on Ethereum as nodes and transactions as edges, then use manual statistics of static node features to obtain node embedding and finally identify phishing scams through classification models. However, these methods can not dynamically learn new Ethereum transactions. Since the phishing scams finished in a short time, a method that can detect phishing scams in real-time is needed. In this paper, we propose a streaming phishing scam detection method. To achieve streaming detection and capture the dynamic changes of Ethereum transactions, we first abstract transactions into edge features instead of node features, and then design a broadcast mechanism and a storage module, which integrate historical transaction information and neighbor transaction information to strengthen the node embedding. Finally, the node embedding can be learned from the storage module and the previous node embedding. Experimental results show that our method achieves decent performance on the Ethereum phishing scam detection task.

Georgios Palaiokrassas, Sandro Scherrers, Iason Ofeidis, Leandros Tassiulas

Since the inception of permissionless blockchains with Bitcoin in 2008, it became apparent that their most well-suited use case is related to making the financial system and its advantages available to everyone seamlessly without depending on any trusted intermediaries. Smart contracts across chains provide an ecosystem of decentralized finance (DeFi), where users can interact with lending pools, Automated Market Maker (AMM) exchanges, stablecoins, derivatives, etc. with a cumulative locked value which had exceeded 160B USD. While DeFi comes with high rewards, it also carries plenty of risks. Many financial crimes have occurred over the years making the early detection of malicious activity an issue of high priority. The proposed framework introduces an effective method for extracting a set of features from different chains, including the largest one, Ethereum and it is evaluated over an extensive dataset we gathered with the transactions of the most widely used DeFi protocols (23 in total, including Aave, Compound, Curve, Lido, and Yearn) based on a novel dataset in collaboration with Covalent. Different Machine Learning methods were employed, such as XGBoost and a Neural Network for identifying fraud accounts detection interacting with DeFi and we demonstrate that the introduction of novel DeFi-related features, significantly improves the evaluation results, where Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-score and F2-score where utilized.

Pushpita Chatterjee, Debashis Das, Danda B. Rawat

Credit card fraud detection is a significant challenge for the financial industry, and the privacy of sensitive financial data is of utmost importance. Federated learning is a decentralized machine learning technique that can enable collaborative model training while preserving privacy. Blockchain, with its decentralized and secure nature, can further enhance the privacy and security of federated learning. This paper explores the opportunities, challenges, and future directions of blockchain-enabled federated learning for credit card fraud detection. The combination of federated learning and blockchain can provide a secure and private platform for credit card fraud detection. Blockchain-enabled federated learning offers several opportunities, including improved privacy, security, and collaboration among different financial institutions. The successful implementation of blockchain-enabled federated learning can revolutionize credit card fraud detection by providing a secure and private platform for collaborative model training. This paper emphasizes the potential of blockchain-enabled federated learning for credit card fraud detection and highlights the need to address the challenges associated with this technology. It is essential to continue exploring and developing blockchain-enabled federated learning to ensure the security and privacy of sensitive financial data while promoting collaboration and innovation in the financial industry.

Fan Jiang, Kailin Chao, Jianmao Xiao, Qinghua Liu · 7 authors

As blockchain technology continues to advance, smart contracts, a core component, have increasingly garnered widespread attention. Nevertheless, security concerns associated with smart contracts have become more prominent. Although machine-learning techniques have demonstrated potential in the field of smart-contract security detection, there is still a lack of comprehensive review studies. To address this research gap, this paper innovatively presents a comprehensive investigation of smart-contract vulnerability detection based on machine learning. First, we elucidate common types of smart-contract vulnerabilities and the background of formalized vulnerability detection tools. Subsequently, we conduct an in-depth study and analysis of machine-learning techniques. Next, we collect, screen, and comparatively analyze existing machine-learning-based smart-contract vulnerability detection tools. Finally, we summarize the findings and offer feasible insights into this domain.

Yu Gai, Liyi Zhou, Kaihua Qin, Dawn Song · 5 authors

This paper presents a dynamic, real-time approach to detecting anomalous blockchain transactions. The proposed tool, BlockGPT, generates tracing representations of blockchain activity and trains from scratch a large language model to act as a real-time Intrusion Detection System. Unlike traditional methods, BlockGPT is designed to offer an unrestricted search space and does not rely on predefined rules or patterns, enabling it to detect a broader range of anomalies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BlockGPT through its use as an anomaly detection tool for Ethereum transactions. In our experiments, it effectively identifies abnormal transactions among a dataset of 68M transactions and has a batched throughput of 2284 transactions per second on average. Our results show that, BlockGPT identifies abnormal transactions by ranking 49 out of 124 attacks among the top-3 most abnormal transactions interacting with their victim contracts. This work makes contributions to the field of blockchain transaction analysis by introducing a custom data encoding compatible with the transformer architecture, a domain-specific tokenization technique, and a tree encoding method specifically crafted for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) trace representation.

Tamer Abdelaziz, Aquinas Hobor

We introduce the Deep Learning Vulnerability Analyzer (DLVA) for Ethereum smart contracts based on neural networks. We train DLVA to judge bytecode even though the supervising oracle can only judge source. DLVA's training algorithm is general: we extend a source code analysis to bytecode without any manual feature engineering, predefined patterns, or expert rules. DLVA's training algorithm is also robust: it overcame a 1.25% error rate mislabeled contracts, and--the student surpassing the teacher--found vulnerable contracts that Slither mislabeled. DLVA is much faster than other smart contract vulnerability detectors: DLVA checks contracts for 29 vulnerabilities in 0.2 seconds, a 10-1,000x speedup. DLVA has three key components. First, Smart Contract to Vector (SC2V) uses neural networks to map smart contract bytecode to a high-dimensional floating-point vector. We benchmark SC2V against 4 state-of-the-art graph neural networks and show that it improves model differentiation by 2.2%. Second, Sibling Detector (SD) classifies contracts when a target contract's vector is Euclidian-close to a labeled contract's vector in a training set; although only able to judge 55.7% of the contracts in our test set, it has a Slither-predictive accuracy of 97.4% with a false positive rate of only 0.1%. Third, Core Classifier (CC) uses neural networks to infer vulnerable contracts regardless of vector distance. We benchmark DLVA's CC with 10 ML techniques and show that the CC improves accuracy by 11.3%. Overall, DLVA predicts Slither's labels with an overall accuracy of 92.7% and associated false positive rate of 7.2%. Lastly, we benchmark DLVA against nine well-known smart contract analysis tools. Despite using much less analysis time, DLVA completed every query, leading the pack with an average accuracy of 99.7%, pleasingly balancing high true positive rates with low false positive rates.

Sihao Hu, Zhen Zhang, Bingqiao Luo, Shengliang Lu · 6 authors

As various forms of fraud proliferate on Ethereum, it is imperative to safeguard against these malicious activities to protect susceptible users from being victimized. While current studies solely rely on graph-based fraud detection approaches, it is argued that they may not be well-suited for dealing with highly repetitive, skew-distributed and heterogeneous Ethereum transactions. To address these challenges, we propose BERT4ETH, a universal pre-trained Transformer encoder that serves as an account representation extractor for detecting various fraud behaviors on Ethereum. BERT4ETH features the superior modeling capability of Transformer to capture the dynamic sequential patterns inherent in Ethereum transactions, and addresses the challenges of pre-training a BERT model for Ethereum with three practical and effective strategies, namely repetitiveness reduction, skew alleviation and heterogeneity modeling. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that BERT4ETH outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant enhancements in terms of the phishing account detection and de-anonymization tasks. The code for BERT4ETH is available at: https://github.com/git-disl/BERT4ETH.

Samantha Jeyakumar, Eugene Yugarajah Andrew Charles, Punit Rathore, Marimuthu Palaniswami · 6 authors

The study analysed the importance of blockchain transaction features to identify suspicious activities. The feature engineering process involves exploiting domain knowledge, applying intuition, and performing a time-consuming series of trial-and-error extractions. Manually overseeing this process significantly impacts the performance of model generation. We address this challenge with an automated feature engineering approach to extract the various features from blockchain transactions. Also, we engineered a set of new features based on statistical measures and graph representation. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can be applied to various blockchain transaction datasets, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. The engineered features were tested against eight classifiers, including random forest, XG-boost, Silas, and neural network-based classifiers to identify the suspicious behaviour of transactions

Rima Kaafarani, Leila Ismail, Oussama Zahwe

Blockchain technology has piqued the interest of businesses of all types, while consistently improving and adapting to developers and business owners requirements. Therefore, several blockchain platforms have emerged, making it challenging to select a suitable one for a specific type of business. This paper presents a classification of over one hundred blockchain platforms. We develop smart contracts for detecting healthcare insurance frauds using two blockchain platforms selected based on our proposed decision-making map approach for the selection of the top two suitable platforms for healthcare insurance frauds detection application, followed by an evaluation of their performances. Our classification shows that the largest percentage of blockchain platforms could be used for all types of application domains, and the second biggest percentage is to develop financial services only, even though generic platforms can be used, while a small number is for developing in other specific application domains. Our decision-making map revealed that Hyperledger Fabric is the best blockchain platform for detecting healthcare insurance frauds. The performance evaluation of the top two selected platforms indicates that Fabric surpassed Neo in all metrics.

Xuanchen Zhou, Wenzhong Yang, Xiaodan Tian

In recent years, the losses caused by scams on Ethereum have reached a level that cannot be ignored. As one of the most rampant crimes, phishing scams have caused a huge economic loss to blockchain platforms and users. Under these circumstances, to address the threat to the financial security of blockchain, an Edge Aggregated Graph Attention Network (EGAT) based on the static subgraph representation of the transaction network is proposed. This study intends to detect Ethereum phishing accounts through the classification of transaction network subgraphs with the following procedures. Firstly, the accounts are used as nodes and the flow of transaction funds is used as directed edges to construct the transaction network graph. Secondly, the transaction record data of phishing accounts in the publicly available Ethereum are analyzed and statistical features of Value, Gas, and Timestamp values are manually constructed as node and edge features of the graph. Finally, the features are extracted and classified using the EGAT network. According to the experimental results, the Recall of the proposed method from the article is 99.3% on the dataset of phishing accounts. As demonstrated, the EGAT is more efficient and accurate compared with Graph2Vec and DeepWalk, and the graph structure features can express semantics better than manual features and simple transaction networks, which effectively improves the performance of phishing account detection.

Yong Ren, Yong Ren, Yan Ren, Yan Ren · 7 authors

Financial enterprises generate profits based on economic development. More importantly, a healthy market is difficult to achieve due to their susceptibility to the parasitic credit card fraud transactions that accompany economic growth, unless an effective anti-counterfeiting technology is developed to alleviate the issue. To solve the problem, we propose a gradient-boosting decision tree based anti-fraud protection with blockchain Technology, referred to as GBDT-APBT, which treats anti-fraud transaction model as the accumulation of the classfiers' weakness and builds up a classifiers' to judge whether the transaction is fraudulent. Each user's private data is trained offline at the local blockchain node, then the trained model is directly uploaded to the cloud, and the final consensus model is obtained by voting. Due to incorporating blockchain technology, GBDT-APBT demonstrates decentralisation, openness, autonomy, anonymity, and immutability, showing its ability to satisfying the demand for an effective and beneficial anti-counterfeiting system, with high performance and effectiveness in detecting fraud information. Experiments show that compared with other methods, GBDT-APBT offers a promising approach to the security of credit card transactions with reference to the detection accuracy.

Ling Cheng, Feida Zhu, Yong Wang, Ruicheng Liang · 5 authors

With the boom of cryptocurrency and its concomitant financial risk concerns, detecting fraudulent behaviors and associated malicious addresses has been drawing significant research effort. Most existing studies, however, rely on the full history features or full-fledged address transaction networks, both of which are unavailable in the problem of early malicious address detection and therefore failing them for the task. To detect fraudulent behaviors of malicious addresses in the early stage, we present Evolve Path Tracer, which consists of Evolve Path Encoder LSTM, Evolve Path Graph GCN, and Hierarchical Survival Predictor. Specifically, in addition to the general address features, we propose Asset Transfer Paths and corresponding path graphs to characterize early transaction patterns. Furthermore, since transaction patterns change rapidly in the early stage, we propose Evolve Path Encoder LSTM and Evolve Path Graph GCN to encode asset transfer path and path graph under an evolving structure setting. Hierarchical Survival Predictor then predicts addresses' labels with high scalability and efficiency. We investigate the effectiveness and generalizability of Evolve Path Tracer on three real-world malicious address datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that Evolve Path Tracer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive scalability experiments demonstrate the model's adaptivity under a dynamic prediction setting.

Letterio Galletta, Fabio Pinelli

Blockchain technology has been successfully exploited for deploying new economic applications. However, it has started arousing the interest of malicious actors who deliver scams to deceive honest users and to gain economic advantages. Ponzi schemes are one of the most common scams. Here, we present a classifier for detecting smart Ponzi contracts on Ethereum, which can be used as the backbone for developing detection tools. First, we release a labelled data set with 4422 unique real-world smart contracts to address the problem of the unavailability of labelled data. Then, we show that our classifier outperforms the ones proposed in the literature when considering the AUC as a metric. Finally, we identify a small and effective set of features that ensures a good classification quality and investigate their impacts on the classification using eXplainable AI techniques.

Hrag Jebamikyous, Menglu Li, Yoga Suhas, Rasha Kashef

Abstract Blockchain technology (BT) allows market participants to keep track of digital transactions without central recordkeeping. The features of blockchain, including decentralization, persistency, and attack resistance, allow data security and privacy. Machine learning (ML) involves the analytical platform on a massive amount of data to provide precise decisions. Since data reliability, integration, and data security are crucial in machine learning, the emergence of blockchain technology and machine learning has become a unique, most disruptive, and trending research in the last few years, achieving comparable and precise performance. The combination of blockchain and machine learning (BT–ML) has been applied across different applications to assist decision-makers in retrieving valuable data insights while preserving privacy and integration. This paper summarizes the state-of-the-art research in combing BT and ML in e-commerce and other various applications, including healthcare, smart transportation, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The challenges and benefits of integrating machine learning and blockchain technologies are outlined in the paper. We also discuss the advantages and limitations of current algorithms in the BT–ML integration. This paper provides a roadmap for researchers to pave the way for current and future research directions in combing the BT and ML research areas.

Rabia Musheer Aziz, Rajul Mahto, Kartik Goel, Aryan Das · 6 authors

Recently, the Ethereum smart contracts have seen a surge in interest from the scientific community and new commercial uses. However, as online trade expands, other fraudulent practices—including phishing, bribery, and money laundering—emerge as significant challenges to trade security. This study is useful for reliably detecting fraudulent transactions; this work developed a deep learning model using a unique metaheuristic optimization strategy. The new optimization method to overcome the challenges, Optimized Genetic Algorithm-Cuckoo Search (GA-CS), is combined with deep learning. In this research, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used in the phase of exploration in the Cuckoo Search (CS) technique to address a deficiency in CS. A comprehensive experiment was conducted to appraise the efficiency and performance of the suggested strategies compared with those of various popular techniques, such as k-nearest neighbors (KNN), logistic regression (LR), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), XGBoost, light gradient boosting machine (LGBM), random forest (RF), and support vector classification (SVC), in terms of restricted features and we compared their performance and efficiency metrics to the suggested approach in detecting fraudulent behavior on Ethereum. The suggested technique and SVC models outperform the rest of the models, with the highest accuracy, while deep learning with the proposed optimization strategy outperforms the RF model, with slightly higher performance of 99.71% versus 98.33%.

Joerg Osterrieder, Stephen Chan, Jeffrey Chu, Yuanyuan Zhang

No abstract is available for this record.

Xuanchen Zhou, Wenzhong Yang, Liejun Wang, Fuyuan Wei · 6 authors

With the increasing popularity of Ethereum, smart contracts have become a prime target for fraudulent activities such as Ponzi, honeypot, gambling, and phishing schemes. While some researchers have studied intelligent fraud detection, most research has focused on identifying Ponzi contracts, with little attention given to detecting and preventing gambling or phishing contracts. There are three main issues with current research. Firstly, there exists a severe data imbalance between fraudulent and non-fraudulent contracts. Secondly, the existing detection methods rely on diverse raw features that may not generalize well in identifying various classes of fraudulent contracts. Lastly, most prior studies have used contract source code as raw features, but many smart contracts only exist in bytecode. To address these issues, we propose a fraud detection method that utilizes Efficient Channel Attention EfficientNet (ECA-EfficientNet) and data enhancement. Our method begins by converting bytecode into Red Green Blue (RGB) three-channel images and then applying channel exchange data enhancement. We then use the enhanced ECA-EfficientNet approach to classify fraudulent smart contract RGB images. Our proposed method achieves high F1-score and Recall on both publicly available Ponzi datasets and self-built multi-classification datasets that include Ponzi, honeypot, gambling, and phishing smart contracts. The results of the experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms current methods and their variants in Ponzi contract detection. Our research addresses a significant problem in smart contract security and offers an effective and efficient solution for detecting fraudulent contracts.

Rima Kaafarani, Leila Ismail, Oussama Zahwe

Blockchain technology has piqued the interest of businesses of all types, while consistently improving and adapting to business requirements. Several blockchain platforms have emerged, making it challenging to select a suitable one for a specific type of business. This paper presents a classification of over one hundred blockchain platforms. We develop smart contracts for detecting healthcare insurance frauds using the top two blockchain platforms selected based on our proposed decision-making map approach which selects the top suitable platforms for healthcare insurance frauds detection application. Our classification shows that the largest percentage of platforms can be used for all types of application domains, the second biggest percentage for financial services, and a small number is to develop applications in specific domains. Our decision-making map and performance evaluations reveal that Hyperledger Fabric surpassed Neo in all metrics for detecting healthcare insurance frauds.

M. K. Nallakaruppan, Balamurugan Balusamy, M. Lawanya Shri, V. Malathi · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Qasim Umer, Jianwei Li, Muhammad Rehan Ashraf, Rab Nawaz Bashir · 5 authors

Cryptocurrency has emerged as a decentralized transaction to overcome the problems of the centralized transaction system. Although it has become a popular trend in online cryptocurrency transactions and mobile wallets, this method has increased the number of fraudulent transactions instead of physically transferring money. Because the shared data and the history of online transactions may lead to fraudulent transactions. The preprocess identification of fraudulent cryptocurrency transactions is becoming an urgent research question. With the exponential blossoming of Artificial Intelligence, the employing of deep learning in predicting social issues has been achieved in many disciplines. From this perspective, this paper proposes an ensemble learning approach for fraudulent cryptocurrency transactions by integrating two deep learning methods: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The off-the-shelf CNN and LSTM, ensemble CNN, and ensemble LSTM with the bagged and boosted approach are compared in terms of accuracy and losses from training and test datasets. Moreover, the 10-fold cross-validation approach is employed for the evaluation of the proposed approach. The evaluation results indicate that the bagged LSTM ensembled approach is significant with 96.4% accuracy and outperforms the other approaches.

Noor Nayyer, Nadeem Javaid, Mariam Akbar, Abdulaziz Aldegheishem · 6 authors

Bitcoin has a reputation of being used for unlawful activities, such as money laundering, dark web transactions, and payments for ransomware in the context of smart cities. Blockchain technology prevents illegal transactions, but cannot detect these transactions. Anomaly detection is a fundamental technique for recognizing potential fraud. The heuristic and signature-based approaches were the foundation of earlier detection techniques, but tragically, these methods were insufficient to explore the entire complexity of anomaly detection. Machine Learning (ML) is a promising approach to anomaly detection, as it can be trained on large datasets of known malware samples to identify patterns and features of the transactions. Researchers are focusing on determining an efficient fraud and security threat detection model that overcomes the drawbacks of the existing methods. Therefore, ensemble learning can be applied to anomaly detection in Bitcoin by combining multiple ML classifiers. In the proposed model, the ADASYN-TL (Adaptive Synthetic + Tomek Link) balancing technique is used for data balancing. Random search, grid search and Bayesian optimization are used for hyperparameter tuning. The hyperparameters have a great impact on the performance of the model. For classification, we used the stacking model by combining Decision Tree, Naive Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbors, and Random Forest. We used SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) to interpret the predictions of the stacking model. The model also explores the performance of different classifiers using accuracy, F1-score, Area Under Curve-Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUC-ROC), precision, recall, False Positive Rate (FPR) and execution time, and ultimately selects the ideal model. The proposed model contributes to the development of effective fraud detection models that address the limitations of the existing algorithms. Our stacking model, which combines the prediction of multiple classifiers, achieved the highest F1-score of 97%, precision of 96%, recall of 98%, accuracy of 97%, AUC-ROC of 99% and FPR of 3%.

Mengxiao Wang, Jing Huang

Due to the anonymity of blockchain, frequent security incidents and attacks occur through it, among which the Ponzi scheme smart contract is a classic type of fraud resulting in huge economic losses. Machine learning-based me... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Tech Science Press

Guangxia Xu, Lei Liu, Jingnan Dong

In recent years, with the great success of pre-trained language models, the pre-trained BERT model has been gradually applied to the field of source code understanding. However, the time cost of training a language model from... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Tech Science Press