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However, it further opens new attack surfaces, and media outlets have reported serious attacks related to cross-chain bridges. Nevertheless, few prior research studies have studied cross-chain bridges and their related transactions, especially from a security perspective. To fill the void, this paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of cross-chain transactions. We first make efforts to create by far the largest cross-chain transaction dataset based on semantic analysis of popular cross-chain bridges, covering 13 decentralized bridges and 7 representative blockchains, with over 80 million transactions in total. Based on this comprehensive dataset, we present the landscape of cross-chain transactions from angles including token usage, user profile and the purposes of transactions, etc. We further observe that cross-chain bridges can be abused for malicious\/aggressive purposes, thus we design an automated detector and deploy it in the wild to flag misbehaviors from millions of cross-chain transactions. We have identified hundreds of abnormal transactions related to exploits and arbitrages, etc. Our research underscores the prevalence of cross-chain ecosystems, unveils their characteristics, and proposes an effective detector for pinpointing security threats.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3700424","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,12,13]],"date-time":"2024-12-13T12:12:12Z","timestamp":1734091932000},"page":"1-27","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":6,"title":["Piecing Together the Jigsaw Puzzle of Transactions on Heterogeneous Blockchain Networks"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"8","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1485-2832","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Xiaohui","family":"Hu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2355-1334","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hang","family":"Feng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0009-0201-3255","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Pengcheng","family":"Xia","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3010-791X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Gareth","family":"Tyson","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ), Guangzhou, Guangdong, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1675-5283","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lei","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7610-4736","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yajin","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1100-8633","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Haoyu","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,12,13]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","volume-title":"d.]. 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