Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum's Peer-to-Peer Network

TL;DR

This paper presents the first practical eclipse attack on Ethereum 2.0 nodes, demonstrating its feasibility and severity through experiments and proposing countermeasures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-stage eclipse attack on Ethereum, including DNS poisoning and slots hijacking, validated on testnet and mainnet.

Findings

Over 80% of public nodes lack sufficient idle capacity for slots.

DNS list poisoning requires only 28 IP addresses over 100 days.

Slots hijacking increases success rate from 45% to 95%.

Abstract

Eclipse attacks isolate blockchain nodes by monopolizing their peer-to-peer connections. The attacks were extensively studied in Bitcoin (SP'15, SP'20, CCS'21, SP'23) and Monero (NDSS'25), but their practicality against Ethereum nodes remains underexplored, particularly in the post-Merge settings. We present the first end-to-end implementation of an eclipse attack targeting Ethereum (2.0 version) execution-layer nodes. Our attack exploits the bootstrapping and peer management logic of Ethereum to fully isolate a node upon restart. We introduce a multi-stage strategy that majorly includes (i) poisoning the node's discovery table via unsolicited messages, (ii) infiltrating Ethereum's DNS-based peerlist by identifying and manipulating the official DNS crawler, and (iii) hijacking idle incoming connection slots across the network to block benign connections. Our DNS list poisoning is the first in the cryptocurrency context and requires only 28 IP addresses over 100 days. Slots hijacking raises outgoing redirection success from 45\% to 95\%. We validate our approach through controlled experiments on Ethereum's Sepolia testnet and broad measurements on the mainnet. Our findings demonstrate that over 80\% of public nodes do not leave sufficient idle capacity for effective slots occupation, highlighting the feasibility and severity of the threat. We further propose concrete countermeasures and responsibly disclosed all findings to Ethereum's security team.