Paper Shows Liveness Attacks on GossipSub and DOG Can Split P2P Networks
chaumian · x · 2026-11-03
A new arXiv paper studies liveness attacks on P2P gossip protocols: the adversary never forges or alters messages—the only goal is preventing honest nodes from receiving fresh messages.
- GossipSub (the pub-sub protocol used by Ethereum): a constant number of geographically distributed nodes with a fixed latency advantage can take over the "First Message Deliveries" peer-scoring term and separate a constant fraction of honest nodes from the mesh. The analysis covers a geographical model, random-peer and outbound-connection mechanisms, and shows the separation persists under realistic churn.
- DOG (a transaction-dissemination protocol for CometBFT): the authors give counterexamples where route filtering disconnects the dissemination graph even without failures or Byzantine nodes, then present a practical attack where a single physical node with a constant number of identities disables every forwarding route using only legitimate actions.
More from Research
- Skill++ paper: routing-aware skill refinement lifts agent routing from 36.4% to 76.3% — dair_ai · 2026-11-03
- CMU launches first Protostar Challenge on climate risk AI, open until Nov 13 — evijit · 2026-11-03
- Tivadar Danka publishes a complete math roadmap for machine learning: linear algebra, calculus, probability — TivadarDanka · 2026-11-03
- Formalizing CFSG Uncovers 96 Math Errors in 47 Peer-Reviewed Papers, Including Annals of Mathematics — skdh · 2026-11-03
- SEC-Bench Pro: frontier labs test agents on 183 real V8 and SpiderMonkey vulnerabilities — NielsRogge · 2026-11-03
- PhD thesis from Aengus Lynch shows aligned AI stays vulnerable: 89% jailbreak, 96% blackmail — StephenLCasper · 2026-11-03