Recent arrival of (on-chain) privacy solutions aiming to tackle this aspect
None of them hide the link between network-level identities (e.g. IP addresses) with on-chain identities (e.g. accounts)
Despite the gains at the on-chain layer, users can be trivially de-anonymized at the network-level which in turn can lead to de-anonymization at the on-chain layer.
What we'll cover
A high-level overview of the Ethereum p2p network
How users publish transactions to the Ethereum
How users query for relevant transactions from the Ethereum blockchain
Issues from a privacy perspective
What this talk is not about
On-chain privacy techniques
Overview of the Ethereum p2p network
Overview of the Ethereum p2p network (Cont'd)
Uses devp2p to find, connect to and send messages to nodes in the network
Overview of the Ethereum p2p network (Cont'd)
Devp2p consists of several protocols:
RLPx
Node Discovery Protocol (Discv4)
Ethereum Wire Protocol
Light Ethereum Subprotocol (LES)
Publishing To Ethereum
Publishing To Ethereum (Cont'd)
Users publish transactions to devp2p nodes by means of gossip
Privacy Issues:
Not traffic analysis resistant (both passive and active)
Publishing To Ethereum (Cont'd)
Current Solutions
Tor and I2P networks have been proposed as solutions