TRacer: Scalable Graph-Based Transaction Tracing for Account-Based Blockchain Trading Systems

Security incidents such as scams and hacks, have become a major threat to the health of the blockchain ecosystem, causing billions of dollars in losses each year for blockchain users. To reveal the real-world entities behind the pseudonymous blockchain account and recover the stolen funds from the massive transaction data, much effort has been devoted to tracing the flow of illicit funds in blockchains recently. However, most current tracing approaches based on heuristics and taint analysis have limitations in terms of universality, effectiveness, and efficiency. This paper models the blockchain transaction records as a blockchain transaction graph and tackles blockchain transaction tracing as a graph searching task. We propose TRacer, a scalable transaction tracing tool for account-based blockchains. To infer the relevance between accounts during graph searching, we develop a novel personalized PageRank method in TRacer based on the directed, weighted, temporal, and multi-relationship blockchain transaction graphs. To the best of our knowledge, TRacer is the first intelligent transaction tracing tool in account-based blockchains that can handle complex transaction actions in decentralized finance (DeFi). Experimental results and theoretical analysis prove that TRacer can complete the transaction tracing task effectively at a low cost. All codes of TRacer are available at GitHub.