From Programming Bugs to Multimillion-Dollar Scams: An Analysis of Trapdoor Tokens on Decentralized Exchanges

We investigate in this work a recently emerging type of scam token called Trapdoor, which has caused the investors hundreds of millions of dollars in the period of 2020-2023. In a nutshell, by embedding logical bugs and/or owner-only features to the smart contract codes, a Trapdoor token allows user...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2023-09
Main Authors: Huynh, Phuong Duy, Thisal De Silva, Son Hoang Dau, Li, Xiaodong, Gondal, Iqbal, Viterbo, Emanuele
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cryptography
Digital currencies
Impact analysis
Maneuvers
Source code
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We investigate in this work a recently emerging type of scam token called Trapdoor, which has caused the investors hundreds of millions of dollars in the period of 2020-2023. In a nutshell, by embedding logical bugs and/or owner-only features to the smart contract codes, a Trapdoor token allows users to buy but prevent them from selling. We develop the first systematic classification of Trapdoor tokens and a comprehensive list of their programming techniques, accompanied by a detailed analysis on representative scam contracts. We also construct the very first dataset of 1859 manually verified Trapdoor tokens on Uniswap and build effective opcode-based detection tools using popular machine learning classifiers such as Random Forest, XGBoost, and LightGBM, which achieve at least 0.98% accuracies, precisions, recalls, and F1-scores.
ISSN:2331-8422