CRII: SaTC: Towards a Secure and Efficient Ethereum P2P Network with Client Diversity

About This Grant

Ethereum is a software platform used for decentralized payments (similar to bitcoin) and also for financial ("smart") contracts and applications. Since its inception, Ethereum has been increasingly adopted by various diverse applications such as finance, health, and gaming. Ethereum implements blockchain technology with a peer-to-peer (P2P) network where each participating node may run different clients and propagation models to enhance its security and efficiency. This effort addresses the following Ethereum P2P network challenges: how to understand whether all clients have compatible communication protocols and behave consistently; and how to prevent the leakage of neighbors' private information to a malicious node. To address these challenges, this effort will develop methods to systematically detect incompatible communication protocols and inconsistent behaviors in Ethereum clients, and design a new approach to preserve node privacy and improve efficiency. Two new courses will be developed based on this research, a course covering the foundations of cryptography and its applications in blockchains, and an elective graduate course on blockchain security foundations. This effort includes three research tasks. Task 1 is to develop an automated testing framework to discover incompatible communication protocols implemented in Ethereum clients that would cause communication failures. Task 2 is to develop a differential fuzzing framework to detect inconsistent propagation behaviors in Ethereum clients that could lead to Denial-of-Service attacks. Task 3 is to design a dynamic propagation model that can select the best propagation method based on the network conditions and neighbor status to mitigate the neighbor privacy leakage problem and improve propagation efficiency. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.