A Feature-Based Robust Method for Abnormal Contracts Detection in Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain technology has allowed many abnormal schemes to hide behind smart contracts. This causes serious financial losses, which adversely affects the blockchain. Machine learning technology has mainly been utilized to enable automatic detection of abnormal contract accounts in recent years. In spite of this, previous machine learning methods have suffered from a number of disadvantages: first, it is extremely difficult to identify features that enable accurate detection of abnormal contracts, and based on these features, statistical analysis is also ineffective. Second, they ignore the imbalances and repeatability of smart contract accounts, which often results in overfitting of the model. In this paper, we propose a data-driven robust method for detecting abnormal contract accounts over the Ethereum Blockchain. This method comprises hybrid features set by integrating opcode n-grams, transaction features, and term frequency-inverse document frequency source code features to train an ensemble classifier. The extra-trees and gradient boosting algorithms based on weighted soft voting are used to create an ensemble classifier that balances the weaknesses of individual classifiers in a given dataset. The abnormal and normal contract data are collected by analyzing the open source etherscan.io, and the problem of the imbalanced dataset is solved by performing the adaptive synthetic sampling. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed individual feature sets are useful for detecting abnormal contract accounts. Meanwhile, combining all the features enhances the detection of abnormal contracts with significant accuracy. The experimental and comparative results show that the proposed method can distinguish abnormal contract accounts for the data-driven security of blockchain Ethereum with satisfactory performance metrics.