Yggdrasil: Network Security for Blockchain and Decentralized Systems

Research Project, 2026 –

Blockchain networks and decentralized systems have moved from niche experiments to critical infrastructure underpinning financial applications, supply chains, and emerging Web3 ecosystems. Yet their network-layer security remains poorly understood. Unlike traditional distributed systems, blockchain networks combine peer-to-peer communication, open participation, and consensus protocols in ways that introduce attack surfaces that are both novel and difficult to defend, spanning everything from eclipse and routing attacks to cross-chain bridge exploits and censorship at the transaction propagation layer.

This project investigates network-layer security threats in blockchain and decentralized systems, with the goal of uncovering new vulnerabilities, understanding their real-world impact, and designing principled defenses. Research directions include protocol-level vulnerability analysis in peer-to-peer gossip and block propagation, network-based attacks on consensus and finality, traffic analysis and deanonymization in privacy-preserving chains, and the security of cross-chain communication and bridge protocols. Decentralized applications and Web3 infrastructure — where network assumptions are often implicit and unverified — are of particular interest.

The project takes a measurement-driven approach: combining large-scale network experiments, protocol analysis, and formal threat modeling to build a rigorous understanding of how decentralized systems fail under adversarial conditions and how they can be made resilient. The work is expected to produce both academic contributions and artifacts of direct value to the open-source blockchain security community.