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Mining the Characteristics of the Ethereum P2P Network

Authors:

Gang XiongAuthors Info & Claims

BSCI '20: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Symposium on Blockchain and Secure Critical Infrastructure

Pages 20 - 30

https://doi.org/10.1145/3384943.3409418

Published: 06 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Ethereum is the typical representative of the second generation of Blockchain technology. To achieve anonymity and decentralization, Ethereum utilizes a structured P2P network for data broadcasting, replication, and synchronization. The Ethereum P2P network topology construction profoundly affects the overall Ethereum system performance and reliability. However, there are few studies on the Ethereum underlying P2P overlay network topology. In this paper, we perform a preliminary investigation on this extensive Ethereum P2P system with a comprehensive measurement method combining active and passive methods. We gather Ethereum nodes information by active method for nodes crawling and verification, and we use the passive network traffic monitoring for routing data gathering. After a period of data collection for more than one month, we get a massive data set that has more than 50 million routing data entries. This data set allows us to gain knowledge on the Ethereum network scale and to derive mathematical characteristics of overlay network structure. By analyzing the data set comprehensively, we find that the Ethereum network exhibits both small-world and scale-free characteristics. There are a few critical nodes that have a significant impact on the robustness and vulnerability of the whole system. The Ethereum network also has a very high concentration in terms of network routing, which is very vulnerable to routing attacks.

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Cited By

Zhao CZhou YZhang SWang TSheng QGuo S(2024)DEthna: Accurate Ethereum Network Topology Discovery with Marked TransactionsIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621281(1711-1720)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621281
Abdo JHossain L(2024)Modeling the Invisible InternetComplex Networks & Their Applications XII10.1007/978-3-031-53472-0_30(359-370)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53472-0_30
Rehman MFigetakis EBello YObimbo C(2022)Experimentation for Decentralized Resource-based Multi-pool Mining in Ethereum Blockchain2022 3rd International Conference on Innovations in Computer Science & Software Engineering (ICONICS)10.1109/ICONICS56716.2022.10100550(1-9)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICONICS56716.2022.10100550
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Index Terms

Mining the Characteristics of the Ethereum P2P Network
1. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

BSCI '20: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Symposium on Blockchain and Secure Critical Infrastructure

October 2020

223 pages

ISBN:9781450376105

DOI:10.1145/3384943

Program Chairs:
Keke Gai
Beijing Institute of Technology, China
,
Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
University of Texas at San Antonio, USA
,
Jiamou Liu
The University of Auckland, New Zealand

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSAC: ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 06 October 2020

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ASIA CCS '20: The 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security

October 6, 2020

Taipei, Taiwan

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Cited By

Zhao CZhou YZhang SWang TSheng QGuo S(2024)DEthna: Accurate Ethereum Network Topology Discovery with Marked TransactionsIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621281(1711-1720)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621281
Abdo JHossain L(2024)Modeling the Invisible InternetComplex Networks & Their Applications XII10.1007/978-3-031-53472-0_30(359-370)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53472-0_30
Rehman MFigetakis EBello YObimbo C(2022)Experimentation for Decentralized Resource-based Multi-pool Mining in Ethereum Blockchain2022 3rd International Conference on Innovations in Computer Science & Software Engineering (ICONICS)10.1109/ICONICS56716.2022.10100550(1-9)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICONICS56716.2022.10100550
Eisenbarth JCholez TPerrin O(2022)Ethereum’s Peer-to-Peer Network Monitoring and Sybil Attack PreventionJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-022-09676-230:4Online publication date: 29-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-022-09676-2
Xia WLi ZLi ZXiong GGou G(2022)EthSniffer: A Global Passive Perspective on EthereumBlockchain and Trustworthy Systems10.1007/978-981-16-7993-3_6(70-84)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7993-3_6
Hieu DKhai L(2021)A Fast Keccak Hardware Design for High Performance Hashing System2021 15th International Conference on Advanced Computing and Applications (ACOMP)10.1109/ACOMP53746.2021.00029(162-168)Online publication date: Nov-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACOMP53746.2021.00029

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