Techreport: Evaluating Tor-based Location Privacy for Ethereum Validators

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 27 May 2026] Techreport: Evaluating Tor-based Location Privacy for Ethereum Validators Muhammad Umar Janjua, Akshaya Mani, Uğur Şen, Daniel Kaiser Privacy and anonymity of validators, especially regarding IP address linkability, are essential to protect the Ethereum network from various attacks. Network-level attacks, such as DoS, can interrupt validators and affect the overall security of the Ethereum network. Correlating the IP addresses of validators with their identities, along with knowledge about their action slots can be exploited by attackers to cause network delays, MEV exploitation, and finality risks. Therefore, ensuring the unlinkability of a validator's IP and identity is crucial for maintaining the network's trust and resilience. In this techreport, we first provide a review of the existing network and consensus layer techniques that have been proposed for maintaining validator privacy in the Ethereum blockchain. Secondly, we evaluate a Tor-based protocol named Tor push that helps unlink validator identities (IDs) from their nodes' IP addresses, thereby making it difficult to determine any end-to-end correlation between validator IDs and IP addresses of validators' beacon nodes. To evaluate the effectiveness of Tor push, we present a working, deployed proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation in the Nimbus Ethereum client. Our PoC deployment pushes attestations, aggregations, and block proposals over Tor to the Goerli testnet. Furthermore, we also analyse the security and latency of Tor push. Our experimental results suggest that Tor can be incorporated into the existing Ethereum network with a tolerable latency overhead of 613.82 ms on average and without compromising the overall network performance while enhancing the location privacy of validators in the Ethereum network. Comments: 12 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Technical report Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) ACM classes: C.2.0; C.2.4; K.6.5 Cite as: arXiv:2605.29131 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2605.29131v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.29131 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Uğur Şen [view email] [v1] Wed, 27 May 2026 21:50:17 UTC (1,022 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)