Cryptography, Vol. 9, Pages 63: An Optimized Framework for Detecting Suspicious Accounts in the Ethereum Blockchain Network

Cryptography doi: 10.3390/cryptography9040063

Authors:
Noha E. El-Attar
Marwa H. Salama
Mohamed Abdelfattah
Sanaa Taha

Detecting, tracking, and preventing cryptocurrency money laundering within blockchain systems is a major challenge for governments worldwide. This paper presents an anomaly detection model based on blockchain technology and machine learning to identify cryptocurrency money-laundering accounts within Ethereum blockchain networks. The proposed model employs Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to select optimal feature subsets. Additionally, three machine learning algorithms—XGBoost, Isolation Forest (IF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM)—are employed to detect suspicious accounts. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) is further applied to determine the optimal hyperparameters for each machine learning model. The evaluations demonstrate the superiority of the XGBoost algorithm over SVM and IF, particularly when enhanced with GA. It achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score values of 0.98, 0.97, 0.98, and 0.97, respectively. After applying GA, XGBoost’s performance metrics improved to 0.99 across all categories.

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Noha E. El-Attar www.mdpi.com