Under the Hood of the Ethereum Gossip Protocol

Kiffer, Lucianna; Salman, Asad; Levin, Dave; Mislove, Alan; Nita-Rotaru, Cristina

doi:10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_23

Cited by 23 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Previous studies like [17] have demonstrated that the node's location directly affects the networking performance and, inevitably, the performance of PoW-based application's nodes. Message distribution is essential in PoS systems such as Ethereum.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Connectivity and Software in Ethereum Validator Performance

Cortes-Goicoechea,

Mohandas-Daryanani,

Muñoz-Tapia

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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 sustainable, shifting to PoS without sacrificing the security and resilience of PoW, Ethereum offers a range of consensus client implementations to participate in the network. In this paper, we present a methodology to measure the performance of the consensus clients based on the latency to receive messages from the p2p network. The paper includes a study that identifies the incentives and limitations that the network experiences, presenting insights about the latency impact derived from running the different consensus implementations at different locations.Our study highlights the need for a holistic approach to node deployment, where hardware, software, and geographic factors have to be carefully considered. Properly dimensioned hardware is essential to mitigate latency-related performance issues and ensure the reliable operation of beacon nodes, especially in geographically distant locations.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Connectivity and Software in Ethereum Validator Performance

Cortes-Goicoechea,

Mohandas-Daryanani,

Muñoz-Tapia

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Various studies have been conducted to investigate the characteristics of blockchain's P2P structure, gossip mechanism and their impact on performance. Kiffer et al [61] studied the Ethereum blockchain and discovered that there was a high churn rate in its P2P. Hence, only a few peers propagated new blocks since churning nodes are usually unable to reconstruct blocks in time.…”

Section: The Impact Of Network Structure and Communication Mechanisms...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey on Network Optimization Techniques for Blockchain Systems

et al. 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The increase of the Internet of Things (IoT) calls for secure solutions for industrial applications. The security of IoT can be potentially improved by blockchain. However, blockchain technology suffers scalability issues which hinders integration with IoT. Solutions to blockchain’s scalability issues, such as minimizing the computational complexity of consensus algorithms or blockchain storage requirements, have received attention. However, to realize the full potential of blockchain in IoT, the inefficiencies of its inter-peer communication must also be addressed. For example, blockchain uses a flooding technique to share blocks, resulting in duplicates and inefficient bandwidth usage. Moreover, blockchain peers use a random neighbor selection (RNS) technique to decide on other peers with whom to exchange blockchain data. As a result, the peer-to-peer (P2P) topology formation limits the effective achievable throughput. This paper provides a survey on the state-of-the-art network structures and communication mechanisms used in blockchain and establishes the need for network-based optimization. Additionally, it discusses the blockchain architecture and its layers categorizes existing literature into the layers and provides a survey on the state-of-the-art optimization frameworks, analyzing their effectiveness and ability to scale. Finally, this paper presents recommendations for future work.

show abstract

“…In theory, given an enqueuing and dequeuing process, it is possible to characterize the distribution of the queuing delay, and this approach is taken in [16]. In practice, the delay distribution can be estimated through network experiments [12,27]. Another work [39] analyzes security in a random (iid) delay model.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Centralization in blockchains: causes and mitigations

Kiffer¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Given a network of nodes with certain communication and computation capacities, what is the maximum rate at which a blockchain can run securely? We study this question for proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) longest chain protocols under a 'bounded bandwidth' model which captures queuing and processing delays due to high block rate relative to capacity, bursty release of adversarial blocks, and in PoS, spamming due to equivocations.We demonstrate that security of both PoW and PoS longest chain, when operating at capacity, requires carefully designed scheduling policies that correctly prioritize which blocks are processed first, as we show attack strategies tailored to such policies. In PoS, we show an attack exploiting equivocations, which highlights that the throughput of the PoS longest chain protocol with a broad class of scheduling policies must decrease as the desired security error probability decreases. At the same time, through an improved analysis method, our work is the first to identify block production rates under which PoW longest chain is secure in the bounded bandwidth setting. We also present the first PoS longest chain protocol, SaPoS, which is secure with a block production rate independent of the security error probability, by using an 'equivocation removal' policy to prevent equivocation spamming.

show abstract

Under the Hood of the Ethereum Gossip Protocol

Cited by 23 publications

References 16 publications

The Impact of Connectivity and Software in Ethereum Validator Performance

The Impact of Connectivity and Software in Ethereum Validator Performance

A Survey on Network Optimization Techniques for Blockchain Systems

Centralization in blockchains: causes and mitigations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About