Attacking P2P Networks: Liveness Attacks on the GossipSub and DOG Gossip Protocols
In briefAttacks That Stop Messages Reaching Nodes in P2P Gossip Networks
SummaryThis paper studies how two peer-to-peer gossip protocols, GossipSub (used by Ethereum) and DOG (designed for CometBFT), hold up against attackers who only aim to keep honest nodes from receiving fresh messages. For GossipSub, the authors show that a few geographically distributed nodes with a latency advantage can capture the peer-scoring metric for first message deliveries and separate a constant fraction of nodes from the honest mesh. For DOG, they show a single physical node can disable all forwarding routes, leaving only direct publisher-to-neighbor delivery, and they verify this attack in a simulated network.
WhyThe authors report liveness attacks exploiting GossipSub's First Message Deliveries scoring and DOG's route filtering, verified in simulation, with cost and mitigation analysis.