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Generative Adversarial Networks for Cyber Threat Hunting in Ethereum Blockchain

Published: 08 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Ethereum blockchain has shown great potential in providing the next generation of the decentralized platform beyond crypto payments. Recently, it has attracted researchers and industry players to experiment with developing various Web3 applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), Defi, Metaverse, and many more. Although Ethereum provides a secure platform for developing decentralized applications, it is not immune to security risks and has been a victim of numerous cyber attacks. Adversarial attacks are a new cyber threat to systems that have been rising. Adversarial attacks can disrupt and exploit decentralized applications running on the Ethereum platform by creating fake accounts and transactions. Detecting adversarial attacks is challenging because the fake materials (e.g., accounts and transactions) as malicious payloads are similar to benign data. This article proposes a model using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Deep Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for cyber threat hunting in the Ethereum blockchain. Firstly, we employ GAN to generate fake transactions using genuine Ethereum transactions as the first phase of the proposed model. Then in the second phase, we utilize bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to identify adversarial transactions in a hunting exercise. The results of the first phase evaluation show that the GAN can generate transactions identical to the actual Ethereum transactions with an accuracy of 82.51%. Also, the results of the second phase show 99.98% accuracy in identifying adversarial transactions.

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    Published In

    cover image Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice
    Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice  Volume 2, Issue 2
    June 2023
    184 pages
    EISSN:2769-6480
    DOI:10.1145/3603695
    Issue’s Table of Contents

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 08 June 2023
    Online AM: 24 February 2023
    Accepted: 23 October 2022
    Revised: 30 September 2022
    Received: 10 December 2021
    Published in DLT Volume 2, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Ethereum blockchain
    2. threat hunting
    3. GAN
    4. bi-directional LSTM
    5. security
    6. attack detection

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