“Ethereum researchers have developed a method to deanonymize network validators that can reveal the IP addresses of more than 15% of node operators. In order to obtain information, messages exchanged between validators are analyzed, the authors state in the article “Privacy Issues in P2P Networks, and What They Tell Us.” Deanonymization can be carried out by nodes acting as “silent observers”, i.e. third parties. “Our deanonymization technology is simple, cost-effective and able to identify more than 15% of Ethereum validators […]”, — write: businessua.com.ua
Ethereum researchers have developed a method to deanonymize network validators that can reveal the IP addresses of more than 15% of node operators.
They are analyzed to obtain information messages exchanged between validators, the authors state in the article “Privacy Issues in P2P Networks and What They Tell Us.” Deanonymization can be carried out by nodes acting as “silent observers”, i.e. third parties.
“Our deanonymization technology is simple, cost-effective, and able to identify more than 15% of Ethereum validators with data in just three days,” the article says.
The methodology was developed by observing the Ethereum attestation mechanism, which divides validators into 64 committees, assigns certain node operators as attestation aggregators, and organizes them by subnets.
Each node subscribes to two subnets and maintains communication with at least one participant. This enables researchers to track aggregator messages and de-anonymize nodes.
“After deploying our registration client on four nodes for three days, we were able to de-anonymize over 15% of Ethereum validators in the P2P network. […] If we run more nodes and run the analysis for longer, we assume that the number will increase,” the article says.
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