Privacy Issues and Concerns on Ethereum Network Layer
Or, why not to use Metamask (with default settings)
Introduction Ethereum’s network layer, or more precisely devp2p (or libp2p) while providing encryption and authentication, does not necessarily give user anonymity or privacy. In this post I will point out some of the privacy issues, and potential attacks to de-anonymize Ethereum account owners (i.e. associating an Ethereum account address with the IP address of its owner).
For simplicity we do not consider anonymity networks during attack like Tor or I2P, although they will be discussed in the Mitigation section.