LockDown: Balance Availability Attack Against Lightning Network Channels

Cristina Pérez-Solà, Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa, Jordi Herrera-Joancomartí, Guillermo Navarro-Arribas, Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in BookChapterResearchpeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The Lightning Network (LN) is a payment network running as a second layer on top of Bitcoin and other Blockchains. This paper presents the possibility of performing a balance lockdown in the LN due to misbehaving nodes associated to a given channel. We formalize and introduce a practical attack, minimizing the economic cost of the attack. We present results that validate our claims, and provide experimental results and potential countermeasures to handle the problem.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationFinancial Cryptography and Data Security - 24th International Conference, FC 2020, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsJoseph Bonneau, Nadia Heninger
Pages245-263
Number of pages19
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12059 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Keywords

  • Bitcoin
  • Blockchain
  • Denial of service
  • Lightning Network (LN)
  • Network security
  • Off-chain payments channels

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