Detecting Fake Deposit Attacks on Cross-chain Bridges from a Network Perspective

Cross-chain bridges are currently the most popular solution to support asset interoperability between heterogeneous blockchains. Over the past year, there have been more than ten serious attacks against cross-chain bridges, resulting in billions of dollars in losses. Among these attacks, fake deposits stand out as particularly destructive. Hackers can perpetrate such attacks by verifying the authenticity of proof associated with fake deposits on the target blockchain, subsequently pilfering the assets. However, existing tools have limitations in detecting this type of attack. To address this problem, this work proposes a tool to protect cross-chain bridges from fake deposit attacks by analyzing the network of transaction traces. Specifically, the framework first records the execution traces for each transaction, and then extracts the relevant contract interactions therein to extract statistical and structural features. Finally, real case labels are utilized to identify attacking and non-attacking transactions. We conducted experiments to validate the tool’s effectiveness and efficiency. In particular, for the detection of fake deposit transactions, our method achieved an average precision of 0.89, a recall value of 0.83, and the ability to identify 38.65 transactions per second.