Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this helps protect from deanonymization and low-level attacks. However, adversaries can bypass this limitation by inferring connections through side channels. At the same time, the lack of topology information hinders the analysis of the network, which is essential to improve efficiency and security. In this paper, we thoroughly review network-level attacks and empirically show that topology obfuscation is not an effective countermeasure. We then argue that the benefits of an open topology potentially outweigh its risks, and propose a protocol to reliably infer and monitor connections among reachable nodes of the Bitcoin network. We formally analyze our protocol and experimentally evaluate its accuracy in both trusted and untrusted settings. Results show our system has a low impact on the network, and has precision and recall are over 90% with up to 20% of malicious nodes in the network.

中文翻译：

---

AToM：比特币点对点网络的主动拓扑监控

在过去十年中，比特币 P2P 网络协议已成为所有现代加密货币的参考模型。虽然该网络中的节点是已知的，但它们之间的连接是隐藏的，因为人们普遍认为这有助于防止去匿名化和低级别攻击。但是，攻击者可以通过侧信道推断连接来绕过此限制。同时，拓扑信息的缺乏阻碍了网络的分析，这对于提高效率和安全性至关重要。在本文中，我们彻底审查了网络级攻击，并凭经验表明拓扑混淆不是有效的对策。然后我们认为开放拓扑的好处可能超过其风险，并提出一种协议来可靠地推断和监控比特币网络可达节点之间的连接。我们正式分析了我们的协议，并在受信任和不受信任的环境中通过实验评估了其准确性。结果表明，我们的系统对网络的影响很小，准确率和召回率均超过 90%，网络中的恶意节点高达 20%。