Understanding (Mis)Behavior on the EOSIO Blockchain

Yuheng Huang, Haoyu Wang, Lei Wu, Gareth Tyson, Xiapu Luo, Run Zhang, Xuanzhe Liu, Gang Huang, Xuxian Jiang

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

Abstract

EOSIO has become one of the most popular blockchain platforms since its mainnet launch in June 2018. In contrast to the traditional PoW-based systems (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), which are limited by low throughput, EOSIO is the first high throughput Delegated Proof of Stake system that has been widely adopted by many decentralized applications. Although EOSIO has millions of accounts and billions of transactions, little is known about its ecosystem, especially related to security and fraud. In this paper, we perform a large-scale measurement study of the EOSIO blockchain and its associated DApps. We gather a large-scale dataset of EOSIO and characterize activities including money transfers, account creation and contract invocation. Using our insights, we then develop techniques to automatically detect bots and fraudulent activity. We discover thousands of bot accounts (over 30% of the accounts in the platform) and a number of real-world attacks (301 attack accounts). By the time of our study, 80 attack accounts we identified have been confirmed by DApp teams, causing 828,824 EOS tokens losses (roughly\$2.6 million) in total.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGMETRICS Performance 2020 - Abstracts of the 2020 SIGMETRICS/Performance Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages83-84
Number of pages2
ISBN (Electronic)9781450379854
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 Jun 2020
Event2020 SIGMETRICS/Performance Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS 2020 - Boston, United States
Duration: 8 Jun 202012 Jun 2020

Publication series

NameSIGMETRICS Performance 2020 - Abstracts of the 2020 SIGMETRICS/Performance Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems

Conference

Conference2020 SIGMETRICS/Performance Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, SIGMETRICS 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period8/06/2012/06/20

Keywords

  • attack detection
  • blockchain
  • bot account
  • dapp
  • eosio

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Understanding (Mis)Behavior on the EOSIO Blockchain'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this