Are Unreachable Nodes Truly Safe? Fully Eclipsing Monero's P2P Network!

2026-09-09

AI Summary

本文针对Monero网络中被认为安全的不可达节点，通过污染可达节点的对等列表并利用Monero自身的连接刷新逻辑，提出了两种新的日食攻击方法，挑战了不可达节点的安全性假设。

Abstract

Eclipse attacks isolate a blockchain node by monopolizing its network connections. Existing attacks on Monero (NDSS'25), Bitcoin (USENIX'15/21, S&P'20) and Ethereum (WWW'26) implicitly assume that the adversary can establish inbound connections, thereby excluding a large and practically dominant class of nodes: \textit{unreachable nodes} operating behind NATs. Such nodes are widely believed to enjoy stronger networks. We challenge this assumption and show that unreachability does NOT imply the expected resilience! We present the first eclipse attacks tailored to unreachable nodes in Monero's P2P network. Our attacks require no inbound access to the victim. Instead, they first poison the peerlist of reachable nodes, which subsequently act as propagation relays to contaminate unreachable nodes' whitelists. The adversary then exploits Monero's built-in outbound connection refresh logic to evict benign neighbors and eventually monopolize all outbound connections. We instantiate this strategy in two attacks: Nyx, which targets long-running unreachable nodes and achieves a complete and persistent eclipse through network-wide poisoning; and Moros, a stealthier attack that exploits the bootstrapping phase to rapidly eclipse newly joined unreachable nodes. We ethically evaluate both attacks. Nyx is validated via large-scale simulations on a Monero network constructed using the SEED Emulator, while Moros is demonstrated on the Monero mainnet against controlled targets. Our results show that unreachable nodes can be reliably driven into stable, long-lived eclipse states. We also propose countermeasures.

Problem

• Eclipse Attacks
• Unreachable Nodes
• Monero P2P Network

Innovation

• unreachable nodes
• eclipse attacks
• Monero P2P network
• peerlist poisoning
• outbound connection refresh