Anomaly Detection based on Traffic Monitoring for Secure Blockchain Networking

While the blockchain technology provides strong cryptographic protection on the ledger and the system operations, the underlying blockchain networking remains vulnerable due to potential threats such as denial of service (DoS), Eclipse, spoofing, and Sybil attacks. Effectively detecting such malicious events should thus be an essential task for securing blockchain networks and services. Due to its importance, several studies investigated anomaly detection in Bitcoin and blockchain networks, but their analyses mainly focused on the blockchain ledger in the application context (e.g., transactions) and targets specific types of attacks (e.g., double-spending, deanonymization, etc). In this study, we present a security mechanism based on the analysis of blockchain network traffic statistics (rather than ledger data) to detect malicious events, through the functions of data collection and anomaly detection. The data collection engine senses the underlying blockchain traffic and generates multi-dimensional data streams in a periodic manner. The anomaly detection engine then detects anomalies from the created data instances based on semi-supervised learning, which is capable of detecting previously unseen patterns, and we introduce our profiling-based detection engine implemented on top of AutoEncoder (AE). Our experimental results support the effectiveness of the presented security mechanism for accurate, online detection of malicious events from blockchain networking traffic data. We also show further reduction in time complexity (up to 66.8% for training and 85.7% for testing), without any performance degradation using feature prioritization compared to the utilization of the entire features.