Analysis of Ethereum Network Properties and Behavior of Influential Nodes

Maeng, Soo Hoon; Essaid, Meryam; Ju, Hong Taek

doi:10.23919/apnoms50412.2020.9236965

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Besides, various studies in monitoring Ethereum networks are also under way. 21,22,23 A previous work 24 in this paper simply explores nodes and visually conveys information about peers. However, no detailed analysis of topology properties has been conducted.…”

Section: Analysis Of Ethereum Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualization of Ethereum P2P network topology and peer properties

et al. 2021

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Ethereum is arguably the second most popular cryptocurrency-based network after Bitcoin. Both use the distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain, which is considered secure. However, the provided security level is proportional to the number of connected nodes, the number of influential nodes, and the supported amount of hash power. Thus, the knowledge of the network properties and nodes' behavior is helpful to protect the network from possible attacks such as double-spending attacks, DDoS attacks, 51% attacks, and Sybil attacks. This paper proposes a node discovery mechanism, which performs a P2P link discovery on the Ethereum main network. For that, we develop Search-node, a modified version of Ethereum client that searches for all participating nodes in the blockchain network, stores the node information in the Bucket, and then processes the peer discovery method. Based on the collected data, we first visualize the Ethereum network topology and analyze the attributes of the network such as node degree, path length, diameter, and clustering coefficient. We then analyze the node properties and provide analytical results regarding the relationship between nodes, heavily connected nodes, node geo-distribution, security issues, and possible attacks over the influential nodes. As a result, we have identified 68,406 nodes with a total of 642,034 edges. By analyzing the collected data, we have found that the diameter in the Ethereum network is equal to 8. The node degree is over 19, which is two times higher than the default configuration.

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Section: Analysis Of Ethereum Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visualization of Ethereum P2P network topology and peer properties

et al. 2021

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“…During our experimentation, we identified a total of 2,578,458 node records, 124,972,682 acquaintance relationships, and 64,559 active nodes within these raw data sets. Notably, the number of active nodes has doubled compared to the data from two years prior [20], suggesting a rapid expansion in the scale of the Ethereum network in recent years. Furthermore, our method discovered a greater number of active nodes than other current methodologies such as ethernodes and etherscan.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…After the removal of data anomalies such as duplicates and fraudulent records, the active node count stood at 41,439 in the first quarter and 64,559 in the second quarter. This reflects a growth of over 30,000 active nodes, when compared to the detection methodology employed in March 2020 [20,21]. Within the group of active nodes, 1,516 nodes in the first quarter and 2,039 nodes in the second quarter did not operate any application layer protocol and were thus categorized as routing nodes.…”

Section: Network Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Half of the Node Records Are Forged?”: The Problem of Node Records Forgery in Ethereum Network

Liu,

Lin,

Zhang

et al. 2024

CMES

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Ethereum, currently the most widely utilized smart contracts platform, anchors the security of myriad smart contracts upon its own robustness. Its foundational peer-to-peer network facilitates a dependable node connection mechanism, whereas an efficient data-sharing protocol constitutes as the bedrock of Blockchain network security. In this paper, we propose NodeHunter, an Ethereum network detector implemented through the application of simulation technology, which is capable of aggregating all node records within the network and the interconnectedness between them. Utilizing this connection information, NodeHunter can procure more comprehensive insights for network status analysis compared to preceding detection methodologies. Throughout a three-month period of unbroken surveillance of the Ethereum network, we obtained an excess of two million node records along with over one hundred million node acquaintances. Analysis of the gathered data revealed that an alarming 49% or more of these node records were maliciously forged.

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“…In 2020, Maeng et al [12] deployed a modified Geth node for 24 hour to collect data from the peers of the network. Their tool discovered 8,223 peers which are mainly distributed in the United States of America, China and Germany (more than 75%).…”

Section: Ethereum's P2p Network Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethereum’s Peer-to-Peer Network Monitoring and Sybil Attack Prevention

2022

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Public blockchains, like Ethereum, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer (P2P) network to disseminate transactions and blocks between nodes. With the rise of blockchain applications and cryptocurrencies values, they have become critical infrastructures which still lack comprehensive studies. In this paper, we propose to investigate the reliability of the Ethereum P2P network. We developed our own dependable crawler to collect information about the peers composing the network. Our data analysis regarding the geographical distribution of peers and the churn rate shows good network properties while the network can exhibit a sudden and major increase in size and peers are highly concentrated on a few ASes. In a second time, we investigate suspicious patterns that can denote a Sybil attack. We find that many nodes hold numerous identities in the network and could become a threat. To mitigate future Sybil attacks, we propose an architecture to detect suspicious nodes and revoke them. It is based on a monitoring system, a smart contract to propagate the information and an external revocation tool to help clients remove their connections to suspicious peers. Our experiment on Ethereum's Test network proved that our solution is effective.

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Analysis of Ethereum Network Properties and Behavior of Influential Nodes

Cited by 10 publications

References 7 publications

Visualization of Ethereum P2P network topology and peer properties

Visualization of Ethereum P2P network topology and peer properties

“Half of the Node Records Are Forged?”: The Problem of Node Records Forgery in Ethereum Network

Ethereum’s Peer-to-Peer Network Monitoring and Sybil Attack Prevention

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