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.
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.
Abstract For a long time, anomaly detection is such a well topic. Its use in the banking industry has aided in the detection of questionable hacking activity. In the network of bitcoin, since all nodes are unlabeled, there is no proof that any particular transaction is the result of illegal activity, this thesis seeks to identify transactions that are unusual or suspicious. Finding abnormalities in the bitcoin transaction network is the main objective. We discuss anomaly identification in this paper with particular reference to the Bitcoin transaction network(BTN). In this instance, anomalies behaviors is a proxy for apprehensive activity, thus our objective is to find anomalies in the dataset in terms of their percentage. To achieve this, we use the feature selection method which is sequential forward feature selection along with three ML techniques, k-means clustering, isolation forest, and support vector machine (SVM) and got the highest accuracy of 98.2% in SVM as compared to all other methods.
Refugee identity documentation is a sensitive process that a host country must go through to avoid unnecessary adversities. Flawless identity documentation is not only important to restrict unwanted population influx, but also to provide public and private services only to the rightful citizens of a country. The established refugee identity system process is faulty, inefficient, and resource intensive. The government spends an incredible amount of time and assets to document the refugees to incur a loss eventually in the inflow of illegal citizens. Our research is keen to change the current refugee identity documentation process. In this paper, we demonstrate a blockchain solution to enhance the effectiveness of the current identity management procedure. We clearly demonstrate the solution using a blockchain-based system where no refugee can become the host country's citizen. We also demonstrate the blockchain architecture along with the internal activities. We present some techniques used in a blockchain to enhance the system's data security and privacy.
Consensus algorithms are applied in the context of distributed computer systems to improve their fault tolerance. The explosive development of distributed ledger technology following the proposal of ‘Bitcoin’ led to a sharp increase in research activity in this area. Specifically, public and permissionless networks require robust leader selection strategies resistant to Sybil attacks in which malicious attackers present bogus identities to induce byzantine faults. Our goal is to analyse the entire breadth of works in this area systematically, thereby uncovering trends and research directions regarding Sybil attack resistance in today’s blockchain systems to benefit the designs of the future. Through a systematic literature review, we condense an immense set of research records (N = 21,799) to a relevant subset (N = 483). We categorise these mechanisms by their Sybil attack resistance characteristics, leader selection methodology, and incentive scheme. Mechanisms with strong Sybil attack resistance commonly adopt the principles underlying ‘Proof-of-Work’ or ‘Proof-of-Stake’ while mechanisms with limited resistance often use reputation systems or physical world linking. We find that only a few fundamental paradigms exist that can resist Sybil attacks in a permissionless setting but discover numerous innovative mechanisms that can deliver weaker protection in system scenarios with smaller attack surfaces.
S Sheela, S. Shalini, D Sai Harsha, Vani Chandrashekar · 5 authors
This research introduces an approach to detect malware attacks using blockchain technology that integrates signature-based and behavioralbased methods. The proposed system uses a decentralized blockchain network to share and store malware signatures and behavioral patterns. This enables faster and more efficient detection of new malware files. The signature-based method involves storing the signatures in the blockchain and the sharing of the signature of malware files among the user nodes of the p2p blockchain network, while the behavioral-based approach analyzes the behavior and actions of files in a separate virtualized environment to identify suspicious patterns. This system addresses the limitations of conventional signature-based methods, which can be evaded by polymorphic malware, and behavioral-based methods, which may generate false positives. The results of the evaluation indicate that the proposed system achieves high detection rates while maintaining low false positives. Overall, the proposed system offers an effective and efficient approach to malware detection by utilizing the strengths of both signature-based and behavioral-based methods and utilizing the security and transparency benefits of blockchain technology.
Jaehyeon Kim, Sejong Lee, Yushin Kim, Se-young Ahn · 5 authors
Recently, cybercrimes that exploit the anonymity of blockchain are increasing. They steal blockchain users' assets, threaten the network's reliability, and destabilize the blockchain network. Therefore, it is necessary to detect blockchain cybercriminal accounts to protect users' assets and sustain the blockchain ecosystem. Many studies have been conducted to detect cybercriminal accounts in the blockchain network. They represented blockchain transaction records as homogeneous transaction graphs that have a multi-edge. They also adopted graph learning algorithms to analyze transaction graphs. However, most graph learning algorithms are not efficient in multi-edge graphs, and homogeneous graphs ignore the heterogeneity of the blockchain network. In this paper, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph structure called an account-transaction graph, ATGraph. ATGraph represents a multi-edge as single edges by considering transactions as nodes. It allows graph learning more efficiently by eliminating multi-edges. Moreover, we compare the performance of ATGraph with homogeneous transaction graphs in various graph learning algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that the detection performance using ATGraph as input outperforms that using homogeneous graphs as the input by up to 0.2 AUROC.
Although the first hype of blockchains is over, subject matter experts are still convinced, that this technology has potential to enable more groundbreaking innovations in multiple business domains. However, to develop the full potential of this emerging technology, it is necessary to consider and ad- dress the associated risks. This survey aims at supporting researchers and practitioners to design, im- plement and improve their blockchain security and resilience by providing a concise overview on the subject. In this article, we describe 24 risks, which we structured into the four domains “Blockchain Structure Vulnerabilities”, “Attacks on the Consensus Mechanism”, “Application Oriented Attacks” and “Attacks on the Peer-to-Peer System”. For each entry, we outline a precise description of the vulnerability or attack, the complexity and its prerequisites.
Khaled Almiani, Young Choon Lee, Tawfiq Alrawashdeh, Amirmohammad Pasdar
The usage of blockchain technology has been significantly expanded with smart contracts and blockchainoracles. While smart contracts enables to automate the execution of an agreement between untrusted parties, oracles provide smart contracts with data external to a given blockchain, i.e., off-chain data. However, the validity and accuracy of such off-chain data can be questionable that compromises the transparency and immutability chacteristics of blockchain. Despite many studies on the trustworthiness of blockchain oracles, more precisely, off-chain data, their solutions are often ‘short-sighted’ and dependent on binary decisions. In this paper, we present a novel graph-based profiling method to determine the trustworthiness of blockchain oracles. We construct a graph with oracles as nodes and cumulative average discrepancies of validity and accuracy of data as edge weights. Our profiling method continues to update the graph, edge weights in particular, to distinguish trustworthy oracles. Clearly. this discourages the provision of false and inaccurate data. We have conducted an evaluation study to see the effectiveness of our proposed method, in which we have run the experiments utilizing the Ethereum network. Additionally, we have also calculated the cost of running these experiments. Consequently, our experiment results show that the proposed method achieves around 93% accuracy in identifying the trustworthiness of data sources.
Md. Anisul Islam Mahmud, A. A. Talha Talukder, Arbiya Sultana, Kazi Iftesam Amin Bhuiyan · 7 authors
The growing popularity of online news has prompted concerns regarding (i) the socio-political influence over news dissemination, (ii) the waning freedom of news media, (iii) and a facile news evaluation process. A piece of news having the power to capture a large audience and sow the seed of bizarre consequences on a national scale should be prudently evaluated before reaching the mass. In quest of making a substantial profit, and sometimes due to inevitable socio-political influence, news with biased heading outpours mass media, resulting in ambiguity and mass manipulation. In this paper, we suggest a blockchain, smart contract, and incremental machine learning-based news evaluation procedure for the Bengali language to overcome these challenges. Weighted synthesis of machine classification and human expert opinion in a decentralized platform are synthesized to evaluate news. With continuous data, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) model is incrementally trained, and the best version of the model is used to detect deprived fake news. During experiments, the NLP model with initial training and testing accuracy of 84.94% and 84.99% was increased to 93.75% and 93.80% after nine rounds of incremental model training. On the Ethereum test network, the protocols have been installed and tested. The simulation demonstrates successful implementation of our proposed system.
Electronic Government (e-Government) systems constantly provide greater services to people, businesses, organisations, and societies by offering more information, opportunities, and platforms with the support of advances in information and communications technologies. This usually results in increased system complexity and sensitivity, necessitating stricter security and privacy-protection measures. The majority of the existing e-Government systems are centralised, making them vulnerable to privacy and security threats, in addition to suffering from a single point of failure. This study proposes a decentralised e-Government framework with integrated threat detection features to address the aforementioned challenges. In particular, the privacy and security of the proposed e-Government system are realised by the encryption, validation, and immutable mechanisms provided by Blockchain. The insider and external threats associated with blockchain transactions are minimised by the employment of an artificial immune system, which effectively protects the integrity of the Blockchain. The proposed e-Government system was validated and evaluated by using the framework of Ethereum Visualisations of Interactive, Blockchain, Extended Simulations (i.e. eVIBES simulator) with two publicly available datasets. The experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed framework in that it can mitigate insider and external threats in e-Government systems whilst simultaneously preserving the privacy of information.