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Record W4411449776 · doi:10.1145/3715766

Automated and Accurate Token Transfer Identification and Its Applications in Cryptocurrency Security

2025· article· en· W4411449776 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueProceedings of the ACM on software engineering. · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicBlockchain Technology Applications and Security
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Guelph
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSecurity tokenComputer scienceComputer securityCryptocurrencyExploitIdentification (biology)False positive paradoxArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Cryptocurrency tokens, implemented by smart contracts, are prime targets for attackers due to their substantial monetary value. To illicitly gain profit, attackers often embed malicious code or exploit vulnerabilities within token contracts. Token transfer identification is crucial for detecting malicious and vulnerable token contracts. However, existing methods suffer from high false positives or false negatives due to invalid assumptions or reliance on limited patterns. This paper introduces a novel approach that captures the essential principles of token contracts, which are independent of programming languages and token standards, and presents a new tool, CRYPTO-SCOUT. CRYPTO-SCOUT automatically and accurately identifies token transfers, enabling the detection of various malicious and vulnerable token contracts. CRYPTO-SCOUT's core innovation is its capability to automatically identify complex container-type variables used by token contracts for storing holder information. It processes the bytecode of smart contracts written in the two most widely-used languages, Solidity and Vyper, and supports the three most popular token standards, ERC20, ERC721, and ERC1155. Furthermore, CRYPTO-SCOUT detects four types of malicious and vulnerable token contracts and is designed to be extensible. Extensive experiments show that CRYPTO-SCOUT outperforms existing approaches and uncovers over 21,000 malicious/vulnerable token contracts and more than 12,000 transactions triggering them.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.855
Threshold uncertainty score0.382

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.007
GPT teacher head0.232
Teacher spread0.225 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it