Honeypot Contract Risk Warning on Ethereum Smart Contracts

As Ethereum's smart contracts have boomed, it has become an integral part of the blockchain ecosystem. Unfortunately, some malicious users also find the opportunity to use fraudulent means to profit. A new reported approach is to lure new users or other attackers into the contract in an attempt to make a profit by exposing seemingly obvious flaws in the contract. But in fact, the contract contains a hidden trap that ultimately benefits the creator of the contract. Such contracts are known as honeypot contracts in the blockchain ecosystem. Previous studies proposed two methods to identify such smart contracts by using symbolic execution and contract behaviors. However, these methods either make it difficult to discover new categories or fail to warn users before they lose money. To solve this problem, we propose a machine learning model to detect honeypot contracts based on N-gram features and LightGBM. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model performs well in different conditions.