Knowledge Discovery Approach from Blockchain, Crypto-currencies, and Financial Stock Exchanges

Poster (2018, August 20)

Last few years have witnessed a steady growth in interest on crypto-currencies and blockchains. They are receiving considerable interest from industry and the research community, the most popular one ... [more ▼]

Last few years have witnessed a steady growth in interest on crypto-currencies and blockchains. They are receiving considerable interest from industry and the research community, the most popular one being Bitcoin. However, these crypto-currencies are so far relatively poorly analyzed and investigated. Recently, many solutions, mostly based on ad-hoc engineered solutions, are being developed to discover relevant analysis from crypto-currencies, but are not sufficient to understand behind crypto-currencies. In this paper, we provide a deep analysis of crypto-currencies by proposing a new knowledge discovery approach for each crypto-currency, across crypto-currencies, blockchains, and financial stocks. The novel approach is based on a conjoint use of data mining algorithms on imbalanced time series. It automatically reports co-variation dependency patterns of the time series. The experiments on the public crypto-currencies and financial stocks markets data also demonstrate the usefulness of the approach by discovering the different relationships across multiple time series sources and insights correlations behind crypto-currencies. [less ▲]

Visual emulation for Ethereum's virtual machine

in NOMS 2018 - 2018 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (2018, July 09)

In this work we present E-EVM, a tool that emulates and visualises the execution of smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. By working with the readily available bytecode of smart contracts we ... [more ▼]

In this work we present E-EVM, a tool that emulates and visualises the execution of smart contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. By working with the readily available bytecode of smart contracts we are able to display the program's control flow graph, opcodes and stack for each step of contract execution. This tool is designed to aid the user's understanding of the Etheruem Virtual Machine as well as aid the analysis of any given smart contract. As such, it functions as both an analysis and a learning tool. It allows the user to view the code in each block of a smart contract and follow possible control flow branches. It is able to detect loops and suggest optimisation candidates. It is possible to step through a contract one opcode at a time. E-EVM achieved an average of 85.6% code coverage when tested. [less ▲]

Non-Negative Paratuck2 Tensor Decomposition Combined to LSTM Network for Smart Contracts Profiling

in International Journal of Computer & Software Engineering (2018), 3(1),

Background: Past few months have seen the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. In this context, the Ethereum platform, an open-source blockchain-based platform using Ether cryptocurrency, has been ... [more ▼]

Background: Past few months have seen the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. In this context, the Ethereum platform, an open-source blockchain-based platform using Ether cryptocurrency, has been designed to use smart contracts programs. These are self-executing blockchain contracts. Due to their high volume of transactions, analyzing their behavior is very challenging. We address this challenge in our paper. Methods: We develop for this purpose an innovative approach based on the non-negative tensor decomposition Paratuck2 combined with long short-term memory. The objective is to assess if predictive analysis can forecast smart contracts activities over time. Three statistical tests are performed on the predictive analytics, the mean absolute percentage error, the mean directional accuracy and the Jaccard distance. Results: Among dozens of GB of transactions, the Paratuck2 tensor decomposition allows asymmetric modeling of the smart contracts. Furthermore, it highlights time dependent latent groups. The latent activities are modeled by the long short term memory network for predictive analytics. The highly accurate predictions underline the accuracy of the method and show that blockchain activities are not pure randomness. Conclusion: Herein, we are able to detect the most active contracts, and predict their behavior. In the context of future regulations, our approach opens new perspective for monitoring blockchain activities. [less ▲]

Non-Negative Paratuck2 Tensor Decomposition Combined to LSTM Network For Smart Contracts Profiling

in Charlier, Jeremy; State, Radu; Hilger, Jean (Eds.) 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing Proceedings (2018, January)

Smart contracts are programs stored and executed on a blockchain. The Ethereum platform, an open source blockchain-based platform, has been designed to use these programs offering secured protocols and ... [more ▼]

Smart contracts are programs stored and executed on a blockchain. The Ethereum platform, an open source blockchain-based platform, has been designed to use these programs offering secured protocols and transaction costs reduction. The Ethereum Virtual Machine performs smart contracts runs, where the execution of each contract is limited to the amount of gas required to execute the operations described in the code. Each gas unit must be paid using Ether, the crypto-currency of the platform. Due to smart contracts interactions evolving over time, analyzing the behavior of smart contracts is very challenging. We address this challenge in our paper. We develop for this purpose an innovative approach based on the nonnegative tensor decomposition PARATUCK2 combined with long short-term memory (LSTM) to assess if predictive analysis can forecast smart contracts interactions over time. To validate our methodology, we report results for two use cases. The main use case is related to analyzing smart contracts and allows shedding some light into the complex interactions among smart contracts. In order to show the generality of our method on other use cases, we also report its performance on video on demand recommendation. [less ▲]

Monitoring the transaction selection policy of Bitcoin mining pools

in NOMS 2018 - 2018 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (2018)

Mining pools are collection of workers that work together as a group in order to collaborate in the proof of work and reduce the variance of their rewards when mining. In order to achieve this, Mining ... [more ▼]

Mining pools are collection of workers that work together as a group in order to collaborate in the proof of work and reduce the variance of their rewards when mining. In order to achieve this, Mining pools distribute amongst the workers the task of finding a block so that each worker works on a different subset of the candidate solutions. In most mining pools the selection of transactions to be part of the next block is performed by the pool manager and thus becomes more centralized. A mining Pool is expected to give priority to the most lucrative transactions in order to increase the block reward however changes to the transaction policy done without notification of workers would be difficult to detect. In this paper we treat the transaction selection policy performed by miners as a classification problem; for each block we create a dataset, separate them by mining pool and apply feature selection techniques to extract a vector of importance for each feature. We then track variations in feature importance as new blocks arrive and show using a generated scenario how a change in policy by a mining pool could be detected. [less ▲]

On the Reduction of Biases in Big Data Sets for the Detection of Irregular Power Usage

in Proceedings 13th International FLINS Conference on Data Science and Knowledge Engineering for Sensing Decision Support (FLINS 2018) (2018)

In machine learning, a bias occurs whenever training sets are not representative for the test data, which results in unreliable models. The most common biases in data are arguably class imbalance and ... [more ▼]

In machine learning, a bias occurs whenever training sets are not representative for the test data, which results in unreliable models. The most common biases in data are arguably class imbalance and covariate shift. In this work, we aim to shed light on this topic in order to increase the overall attention to this issue in the field of machine learning. We propose a scalable novel framework for reducing multiple biases in high-dimensional data sets in order to train more reliable predictors. We apply our methodology to the detection of irregular power usage from real, noisy industrial data. In emerging markets, irregular power usage, and electricity theft in particular, may range up to 40% of the total electricity distributed. Biased data sets are of particular issue in this domain. We show that reducing these biases increases the accuracy of the trained predictors. Our models have the potential to generate significant economic value in a real world application, as they are being deployed in a commercial software for the detection of irregular power usage. [less ▲]

Introduction to Machine Learning for Power Engineers

Scientific Conference (2018)

A Blockchain-Based PKI Management Framework

in The First IEEE/IFIP International Workshop on Managing and Managed by Blockchain (Man2Block) colocated with IEEE/IFIP NOMS 2018, Tapei, Tawain 23-27 April 2018 (2018)

Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the cornerstone technology that facilitates secure information exchange over the Internet. However, PKI is exposed to risks due to potential failures of Certificate ... [more ▼]

Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the cornerstone technology that facilitates secure information exchange over the Internet. However, PKI is exposed to risks due to potential failures of Certificate Authorities (CAs) that may be used to issue unauthorized certificates for end-users. Many recent breaches show that if a CA is compromised, the security of the corresponding end-users will be in risk. As an emerging solution, Blockchain technology potentially resolves the problems of traditional PKI systems - in particular, elimination of single point-of-failure and rapid reaction to CAs shortcomings. Blockchain has the ability to store and manage digital certificates within a public and immutable ledger, resulting in a fully traceable history log. In this paper we designed and developed a blockchain-based PKI management framework for issuing, validating and revoking X.509 certificates. Evaluation and experimental results confirm that the proposed framework provides more reliable and robust PKI systems with modest maintenance costs. [less ▲]

Towards a Management Plane for Smart Contracts: Ethereum Case Study

in NOMS 2018 - 2018 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (2018)

Blockchain is an emerging foundational technology with the potential to create a novel economic and social system. The complexity of the technology poses many challenges and foremost amongst these are ... [more ▼]

Blockchain is an emerging foundational technology with the potential to create a novel economic and social system. The complexity of the technology poses many challenges and foremost amongst these are monitoring and management of blockchain-based decentralized applications. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate a novel system to enable management operations in smart contracts. A key aspect of our system is that it facilitates the integration of these operations through dedicated ’managing’ smart contracts to provide data filtering as per the role of the smart contract-based application user. We evaluate the overhead costs of such data filtering operations after post-deployment analyses of five categories of smart contracts on the Ethereum public testnet, Rinkeby. We also build a monitoring tool to display public blockchain data using a dashboard coupled with a notification mechanism of any changes in private data to the administrator of the monitored decentralized application. [less ▲]

VSOC - A Virtual Security Operating Center

in Global Communications (2017)

Security in virtualised environments is becoming increasingly important for institutions, not only for a firm’s own on-site servers and network but also for data and sites that are hosted in the cloud ... [more ▼]

Security in virtualised environments is becoming increasingly important for institutions, not only for a firm’s own on-site servers and network but also for data and sites that are hosted in the cloud. Today, security is either handled globally by the cloud provider, or each customer needs to invest in its own security infrastructure. This paper proposes a Virtual Security Operation Center (VSOC) that allows to collect, analyse and visualize security related data from multiple sources. For instance, a user can forward log data from its firewalls, applications and routers in order to check for anomalies and other suspicious activities. The security analytics provided by the VSOC are comparable to those of commercial security incident and event management (SIEM) solutions, but are deployed as a cloud-based solution with the additional benefit of using big data processing tools to handle large volumes of data. This allows us to detect more complex attacks that cannot be detected with todays signature-based (i.e. rules) SIEM solutions. [less ▲]