Improving the Accuracy of Transaction-Based Ponzi Detection on Ethereum

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Huynh, Phuong Duy, Dau, Son Hoang, Li, Xiaodong, Luong, Phuc, Viterbo, Emanuele
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Huynh, Phuong Duy
Dau, Son Hoang
Li, Xiaodong
Luong, Phuc
Viterbo, Emanuele
author_facet Huynh, Phuong Duy
Dau, Son Hoang
Li, Xiaodong
Luong, Phuc
Viterbo, Emanuele
contents The Ponzi scheme, an old-fashioned fraud, is now popular on the Ethereum blockchain, causing considerable financial losses to many crypto investors. A few Ponzi detection methods have been proposed in the literature, most of which detect a Ponzi scheme based on its smart contract source code. This contract-code-based approach, while achieving very high accuracy, is not robust because a Ponzi developer can fool a detection model by obfuscating the opcode or inventing a new profit distribution logic that cannot be detected. On the contrary, a transaction-based approach could improve the robustness of detection because transactions, unlike smart contracts, are harder to be manipulated. However, the current transaction-based detection models achieve fairly low accuracy. In this paper, we aim to improve the accuracy of the transaction-based models by employing time-series features, which turn out to be crucial in capturing the life-time behaviour a Ponzi application but were completely overlooked in previous works. We propose a new set of 85 features (22 known account-based and 63 new time-series features), which allows off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms to achieve up to 30% higher F1-scores compared to existing works.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_16391
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving the Accuracy of Transaction-Based Ponzi Detection on Ethereum
Huynh, Phuong Duy
Dau, Son Hoang
Li, Xiaodong
Luong, Phuc
Viterbo, Emanuele
Cryptography and Security
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Machine Learning
Statistical Finance
The Ponzi scheme, an old-fashioned fraud, is now popular on the Ethereum blockchain, causing considerable financial losses to many crypto investors. A few Ponzi detection methods have been proposed in the literature, most of which detect a Ponzi scheme based on its smart contract source code. This contract-code-based approach, while achieving very high accuracy, is not robust because a Ponzi developer can fool a detection model by obfuscating the opcode or inventing a new profit distribution logic that cannot be detected. On the contrary, a transaction-based approach could improve the robustness of detection because transactions, unlike smart contracts, are harder to be manipulated. However, the current transaction-based detection models achieve fairly low accuracy. In this paper, we aim to improve the accuracy of the transaction-based models by employing time-series features, which turn out to be crucial in capturing the life-time behaviour a Ponzi application but were completely overlooked in previous works. We propose a new set of 85 features (22 known account-based and 63 new time-series features), which allows off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms to achieve up to 30% higher F1-scores compared to existing works.
title Improving the Accuracy of Transaction-Based Ponzi Detection on Ethereum
topic Cryptography and Security
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Machine Learning
Statistical Finance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16391