Session 4D: Blockchain Security 1
Authors, Creators & Presenters: Ruisheng Shi (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications), Zhiyuan Peng (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications), Lina Lan (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications), Yulian Ge (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications), Peng Liu (Penn State University), Qin Wang (CSIRO Data61), Juan Wang (Wuhan University)
PAPER
Eclipse Attacks on Monero’s Peer-to-Peer Network
In this paper, we investigate eclipse attacks against Monero, a blockchain system known for its strong anonymity and pioneering the use of Dandelion++ (the state-of-the-art blockchain network layer protocol for transaction privacy protection). Our analysis of Monero’s connection management mechanism reveals that existing eclipse attacks are surprisingly ineffective against Monero. We accordingly introduce the first practical eclipse attack against Monero by proposing a connection reset approach, which forces the target node to drop all benign connections and reconnect with malicious nodes. Specifically, we outline two methods for executing such an attack. The first one exploits the private transaction mechanisms, while the second method leverages the differences in propagation between stem transactions and fluff transactions under Dandelion++. Our attack is not only applicable to Monero but to all blockchain systems utilizing Dandelion++ and similar connection management strategies. We conduct experiments on the Monero mainnet. Evaluation results confirm the feasibility of our attack. Unlike existing eclipse attacks, our connection reset-based approach does not require restarting the target node, significantly accelerating the attack process and making it more controllable. We also provide countermeasures to mitigate the proposed eclipse attack while minimizing the impact on Monero. In addition, we have ethically reported our investigation to Monero official team.
ABOUT NDSS
The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.
Our thanks to the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium for publishing their Creators, Authors and Presenter’s superb NDSS Symposium 2025 Conference content on the Organizations’ YouTube Channel.
Permalink
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Infosecurity.US authored by Marc Handelman. Read the original post at: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NojvdsO2yIg?si=HJg6UHY5PdaiB9iP
