Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: As decentralized finance (DeFi) expands and decentralized exchanges (DEXs) proliferate, the security of smart contracts and blockchain transactions on Ethereum is attracting heightened scholarly attention. With the introduction of the ERC20 (fungible token standard), numerous honeypot ERC20 contracts have emerged within the Ethereum blockchain. Since DEXs permit the deployment of any token adhering to the ERC20 standard, a substantial number of honeypot contracts designed to steal trader assets have proliferated. Specifically, users exchange valuable tokens (e.g., ETH) for honeypot ERC20 tokens but are unable to exchange these honeypot tokens back for ETH, resulting in financial losses for traders. This study proposes a lightweight honeypot contract detection system that can be integrated into the go-Ethereum client (Geth). Unlike previous work, our detector does not rely on contract interaction records or source code provided by contract creators. Instead, it implements static data flow analysis on contract bytecode to infer the mechanisms of honeypot within the contract. Furthermore, as a lightweight detector integrated into the Ethereum client, it focuses solely on the control flow of the ERC20 standard Transfer method, providing a rapid analysis advantage over existing methods that analyze contracts in their entirety, with an average detection time of 9.74 milliseconds per contract. Experiments conducted on contracts known to exhibit honeypot behavior and real-world token contracts have demonstrated the effectiveness of our tool in identifying honeypot ERC20 contracts.
Source: Discover Computing
Authors: Dongze Li, Kejia Zhang, Shiwei Li, Gang Du, Shuang Zhang
Institutions: Heilongjiang University, Guizhou University
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,520
Awards: G4056544160, G4782788700, G8208881435
OpenAlex ID: W4409464936