AetherWeave: Sybil-Resistant Robust Peer Discovery with Stake

2026-03-24

AI Summary

This work addresses the vulnerability of peer discovery in peer-to-peer networks to Sybil attacks, which pose a critical threat to blockchain security. The authors propose a privacy-preserving node discovery protocol based on on-chain staking that simultaneously achieves Sybil resistance and identity privacy for the first time. By leveraging cryptographic commitments and zero-knowledge proofs, the protocol enables verification of staking legitimacy without revealing node identities, while introducing publicly verifiable misbehavior proofs to trigger on-chain slashing. Combining rate limiting with off-chain gossip communication, the protocol operates with O(s√n) complexity and requires on-chain interaction only during staking and slashing. Theoretical analysis, adversarial simulations, and a prototype implementation integrated with Prysm demonstrate that the scheme ensures connectivity among honest nodes with high probability and effectively detects Sybil attacks.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Peer-discovery protocols within P2P networks are often vulnerable: because creating network identities is essentially free, adversaries can eclipse honest nodes or partition the overlay. This threat is especially acute for blockchains, whose security depends on resilient peer connectivity. We present AetherWeave, a stake-backed peer-discovery protocol that ties network participation to deposited stake, raising the cost of large-scale attacks. We prove that, with high probability, either the honest overlay remains connected or a $(1{-}δ)$-fraction of nodes in every smaller component raise an attack-detection flag -- even against a very powerful adversary. To our knowledge, AetherWeave is the first peer-discovery protocol to simultaneously provide Sybil resistance and privacy: nodes prove they hold valid stake without revealing which deposit they own, and gossiping does not expose peer-table contents. A cryptographic commitment scheme rate-limits discovery requests per round; exceeding the limit yields a publicly verifiable misbehavior proof that triggers on-chain slashing. Beyond deposit and slashing, the protocol requires no on-chain interaction, with per-node communication scaling as $O(s\sqrt{n})$. We validate our design through a mean-field analysis with closed-form convergence bounds, extensive adversarial simulations, and an end-to-end prototype built by forking Prysm, a leading Ethereum consensus client.

Problem

• Sybil attack
• peer discovery
• P2P networks
• blockchain security
• network partitioning

Innovation

• Sybil resistance
• stake-based peer discovery
• privacy-preserving
• rate-limited gossip
• on-chain slashing