Open Access

ARTICLE

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

by Yang Liu^1,2,*, Zhiyuan Lin¹, Yuxi Zhang¹, Lin Jiang^1,*, Xuan Wang^1,3

1 School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, 518055, China
2 Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, 518055, China
3 Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Novel Security Intelligence Technologies, Shenzhen, 518055, China

* Corresponding Authors: Yang Liu. Email: ; Lin Jiang. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: The Bottleneck of Blockchain Techniques: Scalability, Security and Privacy Protection)

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2024, 138(2), 1713-1729. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2023.030468

Received 07 April 2023; Accepted 05 July 2023; Issue published 17 November 2023

Abstract

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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Keywords

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