Papers for

cryptocurrency infrastructure providers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Eclipse attacks can isolate unreachable Monero blockchain nodes

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

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.

Wed 9 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
Blockchain nodes often connect to peers to stay updated, and some are behind network barriers called NATs, making them unreachable from outside. It was widely believed that these unreachable nodes were safer from certain network attacks called eclipses, which isolate them by controlling their connections. The authors show this belief is wrong by demonstrating new attacks that poison connections indirectly and take over unreachable nodes' outbound links. Their work includes two specific attacks named Nyx and Moros, tested through simulations and real private experiments on Monero’s network. This shows that even nodes thought to be protected can be controlled by attackers through clever network manipulation.
Open 2609.10260v1