Related papers: Deanonymizing Ethereum Validators: The P2P Network…
Privacy and anonymity of validators, especially regarding IP address linkability, are essential to protect the Ethereum network from various attacks. Network-level attacks, such as DoS, can interrupt validators and affect the overall…
Network-level privacy is the Achilles heel of financial privacy in cryptocurrencies. Financial privacy amounts to achieving and maintaining blockchain- and network-level privacy. Blockchain-level privacy recently received substantial…
Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are…
Private blockchain networks are used by enterprises to manage decentralized processes without trusted mediators and without exposing their assets publicly on an open network like Ethereum. Yet external parties that cannot join such networks…
Ethereum is the largest public blockchain by usage. It applies an account-based model, which is inferior to Bitcoin's unspent transaction output model from a privacy perspective. Due to its privacy shortcomings, recently several…
We hypothesize that peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network nodes can be attractive to attackers due to their visibility, sustained uptime, and resource potential. Towards validating this hypothesis, we investigate the state of active…
The peer-to-peer (P2P) network of blockchain used to transport its transactions and blocks has a high impact on the efficiency and security of the system. The P2P network topologies of popular blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum,…
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have surged in popularity over the last decade. Although Bitcoin does not claim to provide anonymity for its users, it enjoys a public perception of being a `privacy-preserving' financial system. In…
Privacy of users in P2P networks goes far beyond their current usage and is a fundamental requirement to the adoption of P2P protocols for legal usage. In a climate of cold war between these users and anti-piracy groups, more and more users…
Cryptocurrency systems can be subject to deanonimization attacks by exploiting the network-level communication on their peer-to-peer network. Adversaries who control a set of colluding node(s) within the peer-to-peer network can observe…
Stealth addresses are a privacy-enhancing technology that provides recipient anonymity on blockchains. In this work, we investigate the recipient anonymity and unlinkability guarantees of Umbra, the most widely used implementation of the…
Despite their increasing popularity, blockchains still suffer from severe scalability limitations. Recently, Ethereum proposed a novel approach to block validation based on Data Availability Sampling (DAS), that has the potential to improve…
Achieving the equilibrium between scalability, sustainability, and security while keeping decentralization has prevailed as the target solution for decentralized blockchain applications over the last years. Several approaches have been…
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and…
In proof-of-work based blockchains such as Ethereum, verification of blocks is an integral part of establishing consensus across nodes. However, in Ethereum, miners do not receive a reward for verifying. This implies that miners face the…
With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its…
Bitcoin is a popular alternative to fiat money, widely used for its perceived anonymity properties. However, recent attacks on Bitcoin's peer-to-peer (P2P) network demonstrated that its gossip-based flooding protocols, which are used to…
While sharing files in a peer-to-peer (P2P) system significantly increases both the speed of retrieving the contents and the robustness of the system, tracing the access of files is not straightforward, even in the case of private P2P…
We consider the privacy of interactions between individuals in a network. For many networks, while nodes are anonymous to outside observers, the existence of a link between individuals implies the possibility of one node revealing…
Blockchain technologies underpin an expanding ecosystem of decentralized applications, financial systems, and infrastructure. However, the fundamental networking layer that sustains these systems, the peer-to-peer layer, of all but the top…