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With the ever-increasing popularity of blockchain applications, securing blockchain networks plays a critical role in these cyber systems. In this paper, we first study cyberattacks (e.g., flooding of transactions, brute pass) in blockchain networks and then propose an efficient collaborative cyberattack detection model to protect blockchain networks. Specifically, we deploy a blockchain network in our laboratory to build a new dataset including both normal and attack traffic data. The main aim of this dataset is to generate actual attack data from different nodes in the blockchain network that can be used to train and test blockchain attack detection models. We then propose a real-time collaborative learning model that enables nodes in the network to share learning knowledge without disclosing their private data, thereby significantly enhancing system performance for the whole network. The extensive simulation and real-time experimental results show that our proposed detection model can detect attacks in the blockchain network with an accuracy of up to 97%.

With the escalating prevalence of malicious activities exploiting vulnerabilities in blockchain systems, there is an urgent requirement for robust attack detection mechanisms. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel collaborative learning framework designed to detect attacks in blockchain transactions and smart contracts by analyzing transaction features. Our framework exhibits the capability to classify various types of blockchain attacks, including intricate attacks at the machine code level (e.g., injecting malicious codes to withdraw coins from users unlawfully), which typically necessitate significant time and security expertise to detect. To achieve that, the proposed framework incorporates a unique tool that transforms transaction features into visual representations, facilitating efficient analysis and classification of low-level machine codes. Furthermore, we propose an advanced collaborative learning model to enable real-time detection of diverse attack types at distributed mining nodes. Our model can efficiently detect attacks in smart contracts and transactions for blockchain systems without the need to gather all data from mining nodes into a centralized server. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed framework, we deploy a pilot system based on a private Ethereum network and conduct multiple attack scenarios to generate a novel dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our dataset is the most comprehensive and diverse collection of transactions and smart contracts synthesized in a laboratory for cyberattack detection in blockchain systems. Our framework achieves a detection accuracy of approximately 94% through extensive simulations and 91% in real-time experiments with a throughput of over 2,150 transactions per second.

A smart grid is an important application in Industry 4.0 with a lot of new technologies and equipment working together. Hence, sensitive data stored in the smart grid is vulnerable to malicious modification and theft. This paper proposes a framework to build a smart grid based on a highly effective private Ethereum network. Our framework provides a real smart grid that includes modern hardware and a smart contract to secure data in the blockchain network. To obtain high throughput but a low uncle rate, the difficulty calculation method used in the mining process of the Ethereum consensus mechanism is modified to adapt to the practical smart grid setup. The performance in terms of throughput and latency are evaluated by simulation and verified by the real smart grid setup. The enhanced private Ethereum-based smart grid has significantly better performance than the public one. Moreover, this framework can be applied to any system used to store data in the Ethereum network., Comment: 6 pages, conference

This article aims to study intrusion attacks and then develop a novel cyberattack detection framework to detect cyberattacks at the network layer (e.g., Brute Password and Flooding of Transactions) of blockchain networks. Specifically, we first design and implement a blockchain network in our laboratory. This blockchain network will serve two purposes, i.e., to generate the real traffic data (including both normal data and attack data) for our learning models and to implement real-time experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed intrusion detection framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that is synthesized in a laboratory for cyberattacks in a blockchain network. We then propose a novel collaborative learning model that allows efficient deployment in the blockchain network to detect attacks. The main idea of the proposed learning model is to enable blockchain nodes to actively collect data, learn the knowledge from data using the Deep Belief Network, and then share the knowledge learned from its data with other blockchain nodes in the network. In this way, we can not only leverage the knowledge from all the nodes in the network but also do not need to gather all raw data for training at a centralized node like conventional centralized learning solutions. Such a framework can also avoid the risk of exposing local data's privacy as well as excessive network overhead/congestion. Both intensive simulations and real-time experiments clearly show that our proposed intrusion detection framework can achieve an accuracy of up to 98.6% in detecting attacks.