TopoShot: Uncovering Ethereum's Network Topology Leveraging Replacement Transactions

Abstract

Ethereum relies on a peer-to-peer overlay network to propagate information. The knowledge of Ethereum network topology holds the key to understanding Ethereum's security, availability, and user anonymity. However, an Ethereum network's topology is stored in individual nodes' internal routing tables, measuring which poses challenges and remains an open research problem in the existing literature.This paper presents T S , a new method uniquely repurposing Ethereum's transaction replacement/eviction policies for topology measurement. T S can be configured to support Geth, Parity and other major Ethereum clients. As validated on local nodes, T S achieves 100% measurement precision and high recall (88% ∼ 97%). To efficiently measure the large Ethereum networks in the wild, we propose a non-trivial schedule to run pair-wise measurements in parallel. To enable ethical measurement on Ethereum mainnet, we propose workload-adaptive configurations of T S to minimize the service interruption to target nodes/network.We systematically measure a variety of Ethereum networks and obtain new knowledge including the full-network topology in major testnets (Ropsten, Rinkeby and Goerli) and critical sub-network topology in the mainnet. The results on testnets show interesting graph-theoretic properties, such as all testnets exhibit graph modularity significantly lower than random graphs, implying resilience to network partitions. The mainnet results show biased neighbor selection strategies adopted by critical Ethereum services such as mining pools and transaction relays, implying a degree of centralization in real Ethereum networks.

Developing a method for the detection and identification of rootstock blockchain network nodes

“…And since the distance is determined on the basis of node identifiers (public keys), the process of getting a node into a free slot was optimized by sorting keys to obtain a smaller distance. This optimization is absent in similar studies of the Ethereum network [7,8,11,16,17] and was implemented in this work as an additional element.…”

“…Article [11] describes a new TopoShot method for detecting the topology of a blockchain network. TopoShot can be used with major Ethereum clients such as Geth and Parity.…”

“…The general review of the literature [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] allows us to state that the issue of analyzing the node search protocol and developing tools for crawling is important for network developers, its participants, and analysts. However, no studies were found that focused on the Rootstock blockchain network.…”