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)

Eclipse attack is a major threat to the blockchain network layer, wherein an attacker isolates a target node by monopolizing all its connections, cutting it off from the rest of the network. Despite the attack's demonstrated effectiveness in Bitcoin (Usenix'15, SP'20, Usenix'21, CCS'21, SP'23) and partially in Ethereum (NDSS'23, SP'23), its applicability to a wider range of blockchain systems remains uncertain.

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.

View More Papers

A Key-Driven Framework for Identity-Preserving Face Anonymization

Miaomiao Wang (Shanghai University), Guang Hua (Singapore Institute of Technology), Sheng Li (Fudan University), Guorui Feng (Shanghai University)

Read More

Kronos: A Secure and Generic Sharding Blockchain Consensus with...

Yizhong Liu (Beihang University), Andi Liu (Beihang University), Yuan Lu (Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences), Zhuocheng Pan (Beihang University), Yinuo Li (Xi’an Jiaotong University), Jianwei Liu (Beihang University), Song Bian (Beihang University), Mauro Conti (University of Padua)

Read More

Can Public IP Blocklists Explain Internet Radiation?

Simone Cossaro (University of Trieste), Damiano Ravalico (University of Trieste), Rodolfo Vieira Valentim (University of Turin), Martino Trevisan (University of Trieste), Idilio Drago (University of Turin)

Read More

Balancing Privacy and Data Utilization: A Comparative Vignette Study...

Leona Lassak (Ruhr University Bochum), Hanna Püschel (TU Dortmund University), Oliver D. Reithmaier (Leibniz University Hannover), Tobias Gostomzyk (TU Dortmund University), Markus Dürmuth (Leibniz University Hannover)

Read More