SEASONED: Semantic-Enhanced Self-Counterfactual Explainable Detection of Adversarial Exploiter Contracts
This addresses the critical issue of DeFi attacks for blockchain security, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck in existing detection approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting Adversarial Exploiter Contracts (AECs) in DeFi by introducing SEASONED, a framework that achieves outstanding detection performance, robustness, generalizability, and data efficiency, as demonstrated through theoretical analysis and experiments.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) attacks have resulted in significant losses, often orchestrated through Adversarial Exploiter Contracts (AECs) that exploit vulnerabilities in victim smart contracts. To proactively identify such threats, this paper targets the explainable detection of AECs. Existing detection methods struggle to capture semantic dependencies and lack interpretability, limiting their effectiveness and leaving critical knowledge gaps in AEC analysis. To address these challenges, we introduce SEASONED, an effective, self-explanatory, and robust framework for AEC detection. SEASONED extracts semantic information from contract bytecode to construct a semantic relation graph (SRG), and employs a self-counterfactual explainable detector (SCFED) to classify SRGs and generate explanations that highlight the core attack logic. SCFED further enhances robustness, generalizability, and data efficiency by extracting representative information from these explanations. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SEASONED, which showcases outstanding detection performance, robustness, generalizability, and data efficiency learning ability. To support further research, we also release a new dataset of 359 AECs.