skip to main content
10.1145/3634814.3634836acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesasseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

ContraPonzi: Smart Ponzi Scheme Detection for Ethereum via Contrastive Learning

Authors Info & Claims
Published:26 March 2024Publication History

ABSTRACT

In recent years, blockchain technology has witnessed rapid development and received considerable attention. However, its decentralized and pseudonymous nature has also attracted many criminal activities. Among them, Ponzi schemes, a classic form of financial fraud, also hide their true face in smart contracts, causing huge losses to blockchain users. Although numerous methods have been proposed to detect Ponzi contracts, these methods still have limitations in terms of generalization and feature learning. To address this issue, we conduct research on Ethereum, the currently largest blockchain platform enabling smart contracts, and propose a novel contrastive learning-based smart Ponzi scheme detection method named ContraPonzi. This method first extracts control flow graph information from bytecodes and models it as attribute graphs that preserve both semantic and structural information. Next, by augmenting the bytecode data of multi-version compilers and maximizing the graph representation similarity of multi-version bytecodes of the same contract, a pre-training graph encoder is obtained and then can be used in Ponzi contract detection. Experimental results on real-world data demonstrate that ContraPonzi is significantly superior to the state-of-the-art in Ethereum Ponzi scheme detection.

References

  1. Wood, G. (2014). Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum project yellow paper, 151(2014), 1-32.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Chen, W., Guo, X., Chen, Z., Zheng, Z., & Lu, Y. (2020, July). Phishing Scam Detection on Ethereum: Towards Financial Security for Blockchain Ecosystem. In IJCAI (Vol. 7, pp. 4456-4462).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. Huang, Z., Liu, Z., Chen, J., He, Q., Wu, S., Zhu, L., & Wang, M. (2022). Who is gambling? Finding cryptocurrency gamblers using multi-modal retrieval methods. International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval, 11(4), 539-551.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  4. Wu, J., Liu, J., Chen, W., Huang, H., Zheng, Z., & Zhang, Y. (2021). Detecting mixing services via mining bitcoin transaction network with hybrid motifs. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, 52(4), 2237-2249.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  5. https://go.chainalysis.com/2021-Crypto-Crime-Report.htmlGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Chen, W., Zheng, Z., Cui, J., Ngai, E., Zheng, P., & Zhou, Y. (2018, April). Detecting ponzi schemes on ethereum: Towards healthier blockchain technology. In Proceedings of the 2018 world wide web conference (pp. 1409-1418).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. https://go.chainalysis.com/2022-Crypto-Crime-Report.htmlGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. Chen, W., Li, X., Sui, Y., He, N., Wang, H., Wu, L., & Luo, X. (2021). Sadponzi: Detecting and characterizing ponzi schemes in ethereum smart contracts. Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems, 5(2), 1-30.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. Zheng, Z., Chen, W., Zhong, Z., Chen, Z., & Lu, Y. (2023). Securing the ethereum from smart ponzi schemes: Identification using static features. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 32(5), 1-28.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Hafidi, H., Ghogho, M., Ciblat, P., & Swami, A. Graphcl: Contrastive self-supervised learning of graph representations. arXiv 2020. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.08025.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Wu, Z., Liu, J., Wu, J., Zheng, Z., & Chen, T. (2023). TRacer: Scalable Graph-based Transaction Tracing for Account-based Blockchain Trading Systems. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. Feng, Q., He, D., Zeadally, S., Khan, M. K., & Kumar, N. (2019). A survey on privacy protection in blockchain system. Journal of network and computer applications, 126, 45-58.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  13. Chen, W., Wu, J., Zheng, Z., Chen, C., & Zhou, Y. (2019, April). Market manipulation of bitcoin: Evidence from mining the Mt. Gox transaction network. In IEEE INFOCOM 2019-IEEE conference on computer communications (pp. 964-972). IEEE.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Li, C. (2021, November). Gas Estimation and optimization for smart contracts on ethereum. In 2021 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) (pp. 1082-1086). IEEE.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. Reid, F., & Harrigan, M. (2013). An analysis of anonymity in the bitcoin system (pp. 197-223). Springer New York.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Tao, B., Dai, H. N., Wu, J., Ho, I. W. H., Zheng, Z., & Cheang, C. F. (2021). Complex network analysis of the bitcoin transaction network. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, 69(3), 1009-1013.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Chen, T., Li, Z., Zhu, Y., Chen, J., Luo, X., Lui, J. C. S., ... & Zhang, X. (2020). Understanding ethereum via graph analysis. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), 20(2), 1-32.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Liu, J., Zheng, W., Lu, D., Wu, J., & Zheng, Z. (2022). From decentralization to oligopoly: A data-driven analysis of decentralization evolution and voting behaviors on EOSIO. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Gencer, A. E., Basu, S., Eyal, I., Van Renesse, R., & Sirer, E. G. (2018). Decentralization in bitcoin and ethereum networks. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 22nd International Conference, FC 2018, Nieuwpoort, Curaçao, February 26–March 2, 2018, Revised Selected Papers 22 (pp. 439-457). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. Wang, C., Chu, X., & Qin, Y. (2020, July). Measurement and analysis of the bitcoin networks: A view from mining pools. In 2020 6th International Conference on Big Data Computing and Communications (BIGCOM) (pp. 180-188). IEEE.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. Zhuang, Y., Liu, Z., Qian, P., Liu, Q., Wang, X., & He, Q. (2021, January). Smart contract vulnerability detection using graph neural networks. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Conference on International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 3283-3290).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. Qian, P., Liu, Z., Yin, Y., & He, Q. (2023, April). Cross-Modality Mutual Learning for Enhancing Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection on Bytecode. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (pp. 2220-2229).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Jin, C., Jin, J., Zhou, J., Wu, J., & Xuan, Q. (2022). Heterogeneous feature augmentation for ponzi detection in ethereum. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, 69(9), 3919-3923.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  24. Chen, Y., Dai, H., Yu, X., Hu, W., Xie, Z., & Tan, C. (2021). Improving Ponzi scheme contract detection using multi-channel TextCNN and transformer. Sensors, 21(19), 6417.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  25. Wu, J., Liu, J., Zhao, Y., & Zheng, Z. (2021). Analysis of cryptocurrency transactions from a network perspective: An overview. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 190, 103139.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. https://github.com/crytic/solc-selectGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. Contro, F., Crosara, M., Ceccato, M., & Dalla Preda, M. (2021, May). Ethersolve: Computing an accurate control-flow graph from ethereum bytecode. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) (pp. 127-137). IEEE.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  28. Le, Q., & Mikolov, T. (2014, June). Distributed representations of sentences and documents. In International conference on machine learning (pp. 1188-1196). PMLR.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  29. Kipf, T. N., & Welling, M. (2016). Semi-supervised classification with graph convolutional networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.02907.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  30. Sohn, K. (2016). Improved deep metric learning with multi-class n-pair loss objective. Advances in neural information processing systems, 29.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  31. Chen, T., & Guestrin, C. (2016, August). Xgboost: A scalable tree boosting system. In Proceedings of the 22nd acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 785-794).Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  32. Hu, T., Liu, X., Chen, T., Zhang, X., Huang, X., Niu, W., ... & Liu, Y. (2021). Transaction-based classification and detection approach for Ethereum smart contract. Information Processing & Management, 58(2), 102462.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  33. Hamilton, W., Ying, Z., & Leskovec, J. (2017). Inductive representation learning on large graphs. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Recommendations

Comments

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Sign in
  • Published in

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ASSE '23: Proceedings of the 2023 4th Asia Service Sciences and Software Engineering Conference
    October 2023
    267 pages
    ISBN:9798400708534
    DOI:10.1145/3634814

    Copyright © 2023 ACM

    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 26 March 2024

    Permissions

    Request permissions about this article.

    Request Permissions

    Check for updates

    Qualifiers

    • research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited
  • Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)11
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)11

    Other Metrics

PDF Format

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format .

View HTML Format