In Ethereum, the ledger exchanges messages along an underlying Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network to reach consistency. Understanding the underlying network topology of Ethereum is crucial for network optimization, security and scalability. However, the accurate discovery of Ethereum network topology is non-trivial due to its deliberately designed security mechanism. Consequently, existing measuring schemes cannot accurately infer the Ethereum network topology with a low cost. To address this challenge, we propose the Distributed Ethereum Network Analyzer (DEthna) tool, which can accurately and efficiently measure the Ethereum network topology. In DEthna, a novel parallel measurement model is proposed that can generate marked transactions to infer link connections based on the transaction replacement and propagation mechanism in Ethereum. Moreover, a workload offloading scheme is designed so that DEthna can be deployed on multiple distributed probing nodes so as to measure a large-scale Ethereum network at a low cost. We run DEthna on Goerli (the most popular Ethereum test network) to evaluate its capability in discovering network topology. The experimental results demonstrate that DEthna significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Based on DEthna, we further analyze characteristics of the Ethereum network revealing that there exist more than 50% low-degree Ethereum nodes that weaken the network robustness.

翻译：在以太坊中，账本通过底层的点对点（P2P）网络交换消息以达成一致性。理解以太坊的底层网络拓扑对于网络优化、安全性和可扩展性至关重要。然而，由于以太坊刻意设计的安全机制，精准发现其网络拓扑并非易事。因此，现有测量方案无法以低成本准确推断以太坊网络拓扑。为应对这一挑战，我们提出了分布式以太坊网络分析器（DEthna）工具，能够精准且高效地测量以太坊网络拓扑。在DEthna中，提出了一种新颖的并行测量模型，该模型基于以太坊中的交易替换与传播机制，生成标记交易以推断链路连接。此外，还设计了一种工作负载卸载方案，使DEthna能够部署在多个分布式探测节点上，从而以低成本测量大规模以太坊网络。我们在Goerli（最流行的以太坊测试网络）上运行DEthna，评估其发现网络拓扑的能力。实验结果表明，DEthna显著优于现有最先进基线方法。基于DEthna，我们进一步分析了以太坊网络特性，发现存在超过50%的低度节点，这些节点削弱了网络的鲁棒性。