How can validators in a PoS network efficiently hide their IP addresses

Privacy
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Is it possible for validators in a PoS network to hide their IP addresses without causing issues?

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There has been some work done on this in the past. Namely, this proposal by the Pegasys R&D team and this proposal by me to use Dandelion++. There are other proposals in this no longer used github repo (see the issues for the proposals).

I am currently working on anonymity networking for PoS networks. I’ll try to have some more thoughts and criteria posted on here in the next month.

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You can pretty much use any anonymizer VPN

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No you can’t. PoS validators are sensitive to both latency and bandwidth. If such a validator uses any VPN, they are making themselves susceptible to slashing.

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Thanks for your reply Mikerah! I think indeed both Pegasys’s proposal or your twist of Dandelion++ make associating IP addresses with public keys difficult. But since the set of all IP addresses is still exposed/public, in an extreme case the government can simply take out all the validators using their public IP information. What measures do you think might address this issue?

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This is still an open question! Potential solutions include using onion/garlic routing or mix nets.

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