13.3CRSep 9, 2024
Ethereum Fraud Detection via Joint Transaction Language Model and Graph Representation LearningJianguo Sun, Yifan Jia, Yanbin Wang et al.
Ethereum faces growing fraud threats. Current fraud detection methods, whether employing graph neural networks or sequence models, fail to consider the semantic information and similarity patterns within transactions. Moreover, these approaches do not leverage the potential synergistic benefits of combining both types of models. To address these challenges, we propose TLMG4Eth that combines a transaction language model with graph-based methods to capture semantic, similarity, and structural features of transaction data in Ethereum. We first propose a transaction language model that converts numerical transaction data into meaningful transaction sentences, enabling the model to learn explicit transaction semantics. Then, we propose a transaction attribute similarity graph to learn transaction similarity information, enabling us to capture intuitive insights into transaction anomalies. Additionally, we construct an account interaction graph to capture the structural information of the account transaction network. We employ a deep multi-head attention network to fuse transaction semantic and similarity embeddings, and ultimately propose a joint training approach for the multi-head attention network and the account interaction graph to obtain the synergistic benefits of both.
5.1CRApr 7
ExDoS: Expert-Guided Dual-Focus Cross-Modal Distillation for Smart Contract Vulnerability DetectionYe Tian, Yifan Jia, Yanbin Wang et al.
The success of smart contracts has made them a target for attacks, but their closed-source nature often forces vulnerability detection to work on bytecode, which is inherently more challenging than source-code-based analysis. While recent studies try to align source and bytecode embeddings during training to transfer knowledge, current methods rely on graph-level alignment that obscures fine-grained structural and semantic correlations between the two modalities. Moreover, the absence of precise vulnerability patterns and granular annotations in bytecode leads to depriving the model of crucial supervisory signals for learning discriminant features. We propose ExDoS to transfer rich semantic knowledge from source code to bytecode, effectively supplementing the source code prior in practical settings. Specifically, we construct semantic graphs from source code and control-flow graphs from bytecode. To address obscured local signals in graph-level contract embeddings, we propose a Dual-Attention Graph Network introducing a novel node attention aggregation module to enhance local pattern capture in graph embeddings. Furthermore, by summarizing existing source-code vulnerability patterns and designing corresponding bytecode-level patterns for the three target vulnerabilities, we provide an aligned pattern framework that facilitates fine-grained cross-modal alignment and the capture of function-level vulnerability signals. Finally, we propose a dual-focus objective for our cross-modal distillation framework, comprising: a Global Semantic Distillation Loss for transferring graph-level knowledge and a Local Semantic Distillation Loss enabling expert-guided, fine-grained vulnerability-specific distillation. Experiments on real-world contracts demonstrate that our method achieves consistent F1-score improvements (3%--6%) over strong baselines.
From Past to Present: A Survey of Malicious URL Detection Techniques, Datasets and Code RepositoriesYe Tian, Yanqiu Yu, Jianguo Sun et al.
Malicious URLs persistently threaten the cybersecurity ecosystem, by either deceiving users into divulging private data or distributing harmful payloads to infiltrate host systems. Gaining timely insights into the current state of this ongoing battle holds significant importance. However, existing reviews exhibit 4 critical gaps: 1) Their reliance on algorithm-centric taxonomies obscures understanding of how detection approaches exploit specific modal information channels; 2) They fail to incorporate pivotal LLM/Transformer-based defenses; 3) No open-source implementations are collected to facilitate benchmarking; 4) Insufficient dataset coverage.This paper presents a comprehensive review of malicious URL detection technologies, systematically analyzing methods from traditional blacklisting to advanced deep learning approaches (e.g. Transformer, GNNs, and LLMs). Unlike prior surveys, we propose a novel modality-based taxonomy that categorizes existing works according to their primary data modalities (URL, HTML, Visual, etc.). This hierarchical classification enables both rigorous technical analysis and clear understanding of multimodal information utilization. Furthermore, to establish a profile of accessible datasets and address the lack of standardized benchmarking (where current studies often lack proper baseline comparisons), we curate and analyze: 1) publicly available datasets (2016-2024), and 2) open-source implementations from published works(2013-2025). Then, we outline essential design principles and architectural frameworks for product-level implementations. The review concludes by examining emerging challenges and proposing actionable directions for future research. We maintain a GitHub repository for ongoing curating datasets and open-source implementations: https://github.com/sevenolu7/Malicious-URL-Detection-Open-Source/tree/master.
2.0CVApr 12, 2024
Struggle with Adversarial Defense? Try DiffusionYujie Li, Yanbin Wang, Haitao Xu et al.
Adversarial attacks induce misclassification by introducing subtle perturbations. Recently, diffusion models are applied to the image classifiers to improve adversarial robustness through adversarial training or by purifying adversarial noise. However, diffusion-based adversarial training often encounters convergence challenges and high computational expenses. Additionally, diffusion-based purification inevitably causes data shift and is deemed susceptible to stronger adaptive attacks. To tackle these issues, we propose the Truth Maximization Diffusion Classifier (TMDC), a generative Bayesian classifier that builds upon pre-trained diffusion models and the Bayesian theorem. Unlike data-driven classifiers, TMDC, guided by Bayesian principles, utilizes the conditional likelihood from diffusion models to determine the class probabilities of input images, thereby insulating against the influences of data shift and the limitations of adversarial training. Moreover, to enhance TMDC's resilience against more potent adversarial attacks, we propose an optimization strategy for diffusion classifiers. This strategy involves post-training the diffusion model on perturbed datasets with ground-truth labels as conditions, guiding the diffusion model to learn the data distribution and maximizing the likelihood under the ground-truth labels. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CIFAR10 dataset against heavy white-box attacks and strong adaptive attacks. Specifically, TMDC achieves robust accuracies of 82.81% against $l_{\infty}$ norm-bounded perturbations and 86.05% against $l_{2}$ norm-bounded perturbations, respectively, with $ε=0.05$.